“This tragic case of failing to assist is very troubling to me,” Franz-Josef Overbeck, the Roman Catholic Bishop of Essen said at the time of the events. “I truly believe that a society without real compassion is not able to exist.”

The security camera footage showed that the victim had approached an automated teller machine, prosecutors said, but had then collapsed once, and again. The third time, he was unable to get back up, and he lay on the tile floor between banking terminals.

More than five minutes later, a customer entered the foyer and stepped over the man to withdraw cash from an A.T.M. The customer then stepped over the man once more, without so much as a glance, and left the building.

Over the next five minutes, three more people entered, stepped around or over the man, took out cash and left. It was not until the arrival of a fifth customer, who asked to be identified only as Patrick S., that an ambulance was called — about 20 minutes after the man had fallen.

“I didn’t care if it was a homeless man or someone else,” Patrick S. told the public broadcaster WDR. “I call an ambulance when someone is lying on the ground and needs help.”

But not everyone would respond that way. “When there are factors, such as the person in need of help is drunk or looks homeless, then the willingness to help is close to zero,” Rainer Banse, a professor of psychology at the University of Bonn, told the public broadcaster ARD.

There are no government statistics on the number of homeless people in Germany, but according to the Federal Association of Help for the Homeless, about 335,000 people live on the country’s streets.