The spread of antibiotic-resistant bacteria (ARB) poses a serious challenge, having directly caused 1.27 million deaths around the world in 2019, and contributed to 4.95 million (Mur-ray et al. 2022). The introduction of routine diagnostics for the detection of antibiotic re-sistance genes (ARG) in wastewater could be a major opportunity for the surveillance of and decision-making regarding the spread of ARB and ARG. As wastewater monitoring has al-ready been established for the detection of pathogenic viruses, like SARS-CoV-2 and influ-enza virus, it could also be used to implement timely actions to protect the population from this so-called silent pandemic. The aim of this study was to conduct a qualitative analysis of wastewater samples from Germany for five carbapenemase-encoding genes. The experi-ments were performed using real-time polymerase chain reaction (PCR) in a biosafety level 2 laboratory. The PCR results showed that the samples contained multiple genes encoding for antibiotic resistance.