Germany typically pays PhD students as research or teaching assistant (there are Grad schools in CS but this is the minority at least in my lab) When I started in 2005 the salary was even better than in many industry CS jobs (today the situation changed a bit). The problem I faced was that afterwards the PhD was not actually really valued by industry and I could not get myself to do a boring industry job without being paid 'adequately' to compensate for the loss of freedom. So I stayed at university again. I still have my freedoms but am kind of stuck in the academic system. If I would have gone to industry straight away my salary would probably be much higher by now.