I checked the German wiki for word lists. The respective wiki article refers to this list (among others): https://web.archive.org/web/20091015234803/http://wortschatz.uni-leipzig.de/Papers/top10000de.txt
Besides it containing different variations of the same word, acronyms and even single letters, one thing you find very often are names. Besides the questionable necessity to know them, they are not even common in a sense one may think of. I choose those examples just to point out that the approach mentioned by the OP is probably not as useful as it appears at first.
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