German has an intrinsic word order of SOV, i.e. it shares many linguistic characteristics with other SOV languages, such as Japanese. However, German has an interesting feature, V2, which takes precedence over its SOV feature. The primary inflected verb, is always the second phrase (in the linguistic, phrase structure tree sense) in the sentence. Note that auxiliary and modal verbs can be primary verbs too. When a verb occurs in its infinitive form, it is at the end of the clause, thus exposing the underlying SOV pattern in German. This reasoning explains sentences such as "I have a new house bought". Other than the fairly rigid rule of V2 and SOV word order, the other constituents of a sentence may be shuffled around arbitrarily. Sentences such as "I killed a man from Vienna yesterday" and "A man killed I from Vienna yesterday", would mean the same thing, as a somewhat extreme example.
Interestingly, English used to have V2 sentence structure somewhere in the shrouds of antiquity, but lost it sometime during its evolution. We still see vestiges of V2 structure in questions -- "When would he come to visit you?", or "How can I help you?". Note, however that English is an SVO language, which is why our questions don't sound like "How can I you help?"