Southern Germany is a long way from Chernobyl, but a substantial amount of the fallout rained down here. Pretty much nothing grown in the areas that got contaminated precipitation was safe to eat, sometimes for years. Milk was way too contaminated even after dilution with milk from other areas, and pretty high amounts of radionuclides accumulated in the bottom layers of sandboxes on playgrounds and other unexpected places.
No one knew at first though, the West German government kept playing down the incident even though they knew that fallout reaching Germany was a big possibility, and thus lots and lots of people got rained on who could have protected themselves (my mom for one, on the way to work, metallic taste and all)
That's a pretty important part of the anti-nuclear sentiment in Germany, by the way. That's why a lot of people simply won't trust the parties involved in running nuclear power plants to do so safely – because the system failed already in an incident that wasn't even a domestic one, and also because of the rampant corruption surrounding those plants and high-level politics in general.