The not-too-old German branch of Ancestry.com, Ancestry.de provides both for-fee, premium content to its subscribers and free materials to its visitors.

Their press release of Apr 17, 2007 mentions one additional resource to be available for free.

This free one has two features:
- based on phone directories of today's Germany one can observe the geographic distribution of any surname listed in them.
- origins, meanings and linguistical relations of 20,000 German surnames, including the 10,000 most frequent ones can be searched. The source for this tool is the reference work by Duden with the title Familiennamen (Family names).

Visit the Ancestry.de site. Click on "Verteilung" for the distribution tool and "Ursprung" for the origins of surnames.