^^^ here is your reason. Nobody knew about the other companies. Everyone knows about Google doing it.

Das Telefonbuch have a system where you can look up someone's name in a town, and list their address and provide links to view satellite images of the street:

http://www.dastelefonbuch.de/

If Germans were really more conscious of privacy then I suspect they'd be worried about this, but as previous posters have said it's more down to misinformation and exaggeration.

As mentioned below, Sightwalk is one, I forget the other one. I hadn't heard of the other one before the Street View mess either, so I'm not too surprised. But as far as I'm aware, Sightwalk made it very public that they were doing this, and did not get much criticism at the time. Their optout method is nearly identical to the one Google is currently offering.

I only know http://sightwalk.de/