this HAS to be an urban legend
even though I just read it on Reuters:
BERLIN (Reuters) - German police broke into a darkened apartment fearing they would find a dead body, after neighbors complained of a nasty smell seeping out onto the staircase.
The shutters of the apartment had been closed for more than a week and the mailbox was filled with uncollected mail.
But instead of a corpse, they found a tenant with very smelly feet, asleep in bed next to a pile of foul-smelling laundry, police in the southwestern town of Kaiserslautern said on Sunday.
See, this would be believable if he had been French…