Discussion on answer by user2768: What to do with students requesting deadline extension due to the death of a relative (but without a doctor's note)?

We later on have a "Sterbeurkunde" which is an excerpt form the civil register and contains less confidential information. This will usually be available within a few weeks, but there may be surprises and delays, e.g. when the birth certificate is missing ( people loose documents due to war, fire, flight etc., and even if there are supposed to be register archives at their birth place, these archives sometimes burn, get flooded, etc. - may sound far fetched, but we had exactly this trouble in the family [fortunately it turned out that the relevant part of the archive survived the flooding])

@WoJ in my experience the time frame for bank and university is rather different: we've had a bank taking more than a year to re-grant the spouse access to their common account (while other banks manage within 2 weeks), so I'm not sure they are a good reference point here. I don't think a university wants to hold the pass/fail undecided for possibly months because a deadline extension of a few days would retrospectively turn out to not be correct. This would be disproportionate, in particular if the instructor does have the leeway to give an extension of similar length on their discretion.