I believe that the card starts with wherever it was made to be sold and then is updated by the AP, which may or may not be located in the country it was made to be sold, and discards any unavailable channels as above.

Whenever I start to answer a post involving a card or router purchased at that famous on-line auction site, I grit my teeth, take a tranquilizer and suspect cfg80211, since at least one piece of the puzzle may not be where it thinks it should be.

You might write a conf file, reboot and see what happens:
Code:
sudo gedit (vim, nano, emacs, et al) /etc/modprobe.d/cfg80211.conf
Add a single line:
Code:
options cfg80211 ieee80211_regdom=DE
Proofread, save and close gedit. Reboot. Does it work? If not, I'd change to JP and even GB and try again.