Hi all together,
In that screenshot you can clearly see that this is twice the same place.
If I mark it as a duplicate, it’s set to ‘not applied’ within seconds.
I don’t quite understand that. If google maps is eager to keep duplicates like that (for whatever stupid reason), please tell me 
IMHO neither a human being nor an algorythm can fail to recognize this as a duplicate.
BTW I can show you also a yet stranger example with four entries 
Hello @fuzzi_68
There are many reasons for rejection of a request for the removal of any duplicated POI.
The foremost being the existence of a large number of reviews & photos at both places.
Added to that, if the owner has claimed any of the places, then the merging becomes further complicated.
Also, another reason is unmatched categories of the two places.
The correct steps to achieve that would be,
In the case presented by you, one is Physiatrist, and another is Physiotherapist. Maybe the category is the same but the words used are different. However, no one has claimed any of the places & hence merging would be possible after the types match.
Nevertheless, I find the Frau Frauke name distributed over a large number of regions & thus appears to be a chain. So which one is legitimate?
Understanding how a system works is the first thing to do, @fuzzi_68 , when you want to make an edit, especially for duplicate places. An algorithm works on data, and if the data are not matching, the merge will be rejected. Trying to merge two POIs that have two different categories is simply not possible.
In my area, just to give you an example, near an hospital there are a lot of small business that offer various, and sometimes similar, services. Frequently they also have a similar name, that is frequently the name of the area or the name of the hospital.
Does it mean that they are duplicate? No, they aren’t. Algorithms are not stupid nor smart. They work on data, based on a set of instructions.
So it is our duty to check if the data are matching, before to try to submit an edit that in some cases can be destructive, and remove a legitimate business.
Please read carefully @C_T 's answer, as he’s giving a lot of inputs about the preliminary work needed before to attempt a merge
Hi @C_T
Thanks a lot, some of your hints (category mismatch, ownership) are really helpful to explain why it doesn’t work.
Concerning the name …
‘Frau’ just means ‘Ms/Mrs’ in German so that doesn’t say anything and ‘Frauke’ is a given name for girls just as Elizabeth or Mary, so this isn’t significant either - despite the fact that this is a funny alliteration 
The surname ‘Widdrat’ on the contrary, is very rare. I’ve never heard of that name other than there.
How can you tell if someone has claimed that business?
Do you need superpowers to obtain this piece of information or can I find that out being an ordinary user?
@fuzzi_68 it’s actually a funny/complicated situation. If you are using the Maps interface in German (as you might be doing) both places seem to have the same category, but if you check with the interface switched to English, you will see that the 2 have slightly different categories as @C_T already pointed out: physiatrist vs. physical therapist. In German both seem to have the same translation, and to make things more confusing: the latter is currently no longer available for selection in German (it has to have been in the past, as it is clearly still in use here).
As mentioned in previous replies from @ErmesT and @C_T : places with different categories can’t be merged, so I suggest that you would first change the category of ‘Widdrat, Frauke AZP Ambulantes Zentrum für Physiotherapie, Krankengymnastik’ to the still available ‘Physiatrist’. In a next step, I would also look at the name of the place. The guideline there is that the name on Maps should be as it is shown on the storefront, so in this case (based on the photo) I would suggest to change both place names to “AZP - Ambulantes Zentrum für Physiotherapie”. Once those changes have been approved, a merge request would have a much better chance of succeeding.
About the claiming: that is quite easy to spot. If the profile page still contains the button ‘Claim this business’ (in German: ‘Als Inhaber eintragen’) then the business is not claimed.
And finally: DO please share the example with 4 duplicates - as you will have noticed by now, there are people out here who love this stuff
Hi @JanVanHaver - thanks a lot
I have suggested this category adaption in the meantime.
I got my computer stuff in English, though I live in Germany, I’m born in Germany, my native tongue is German …
But when I was first confronted with computers they were running in English only and IMHO it doesn’t make sense to swith to a ‘local’ language if one is already familiar with the ‘world’ language.
Yeah now the four-entry shop (btw it used to have even six, we could manage to bring this down to four, at least)
I uploaded the same picture to all five (at that time) entries hoping that would help clear it up …
@fuzzi_68 quite a mess indeed. What most likely happened here is that separate POIs were created for the various activities because the business owner is not aware of the Google My Business program. That allows business owner to add up to 9 different categories to their Maps entry - but they first need to claim the business to enroll into it.
Some of the 4 are marked as temporary closed (due to Covid-19, most likely in a bulk operation by Google), so in order to make changes to those you would first need to know if they are actually still closed or not. As most shops in Germany are already open again now, I guess it will no longer be temporary closed, so the first step there would be to ‘reopen’ them.
If you want more info on topis like these, you can check the post about the Local Guides Clean the Map campaign (and the links listed there) and listen to some episodes of the LetsGuide Podcast
Final remark: you mention “IMHO it doesn’t make sense to swith to a ‘local’ language” - are you 100% certain that you are German? I work for a German company (and because of that spend a lot of time in Bochum), and I find that attitude quite exceptional for a German 
Hi @JanVanHaver
Thanks a lot again.
When I was collecting all these four links I noticed that they all got different categories. Thanks for explaining how that should work if ‘done as it’s supposed to’
You are right indeed, a lot of things which appear ‘normal’ to my ‘fellow Germans’ appear strange to me.
They got their conventions and habits, which they usually never question. I do!
So sometimes my opinion differs from theirs.
And, if you want to split hairs, I’m (originally) Bavarian. Maybe that explains my preference for english interfaces. English - German … It’s foreign anyways
