Finnish also has lots of compound words. German might be different, but in Finnish words might sometimes have a slightly different meaning if the words are writ

Finnish also has lots of compound words. German might be different, but in Finnish words might sometimes have a slightly different meaning if the words are written separately (with a space) or as a compound. (Often that other meaning is rarely used, and there would almost never be any actual potential for confusion, but technically there may still be a difference.) Some of the compounds may be written as compounds because that's just how you're supposed to write them, but sometimes there might be some kind of actual semantics behind it. Could there be something similar going on in German, or is it really that German-speakers just concatenate things that English-speakers would write separately?