How can I properly display German characters in HTML?

I'm not sure cutting and pasting will work once the character gets to the browser. You probably need to encode the special characters using HTML character encodings. First, at the head of your document, let the browser know that you're using an "extended" character set:

<meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html;charset=utf-8" />

Then insert special codes wherever you want a specific German character. For example a capital A-umlaut (Ä) is encoded as: &#196; (don't forget the semicolon), or using a slightly more user-friendly notation: &Auml;

There's a full table of German character encodings at:

http://webdesign.about.com/od/localization/l/blhtmlcodes-de.htm

Good Luck

BTW: On CR4 you can insert most German characters (and many others) into your post using the "insert special symbols" command from the toolbar (Ω)