page_title: Dog tag
section_title: Germany
hierarchical_section_title: Dog tag / Variations by country / Germany
caption_attribution_description: Deutsch: Erkennungsmarke der Bundeswehr (1961) English: Military identity disk (“dog tag”) of the German Bundeswehr (1961) Русский: Лицевая сторона жетона военнослужащего] ru:бундесвера (1961) Height: 50.3 mm (1.98 in). Width: 80 mm (3.15 in). Depth: 0.2 mm (0.01 in).
context_page_description: "Dog tag" is an informal but common term for a specific type of identification tag worn by military personnel. The tags' primary use is for the identification of casualties; as such, they have information about the personnel written on them, and convey essential basic medical information such as their blood type and history of inoculations. They often indicate religious preference as well.
  Dog tags are usually fabricated from a corrosion-resistant metal. They commonly contain two copies of the information, either in the form of a single tag that can be broken in half, or as two identical tags on the same chain. This purposeful duplication allows one tag, or half-tag, to be collected from a personnel's dead body for notification, while the duplicate remains with the corpse if the conditions of battle prevent it from being immediately recovered. The term arose and became popular because of the tags' resemblance to animal registration tags.
context_section_description: German Bundeswehr ID tags are an oval-shaped disc designed to be broken in half. They are made of stainless steel, 50.3 millimetres (1.98 in) heigh and 80 millimetres (3.1 in) width. The two sides contain different information which are mirrored upside-down on the lower half of the ID tag. They feature the following information on segmented and numbered fields:
  On the front:
  Field 1: blank (provided for Gender but never used)
  Field 2: DEU (for Deutschland) (GE (for Germany) only on older ID tags)
  Field 3: Religious preference ("K" or "RK" for Roman Catholic, "E" or "EV" for Protestant, "O" for Christian Orthodox, "ISL" for Islamic, "JD" for Jewish, blank if no preference)
  Field 4: Personenkennziffer (service number: birth date in DDMMYY format, dash, capitalized first letter of last name, dash, and five-digit number based on soldier's home military administrative district, number of persons with the mentioned last name initial and same birthday, and an error-checking number but without dashes), ex. 101281-S-455(-)6(-)8
  On the back:
  Field 5: Blood group (A, AB, B, 0)
  Field 6: Rh factor (Rh+ or Rh-)
  Field 7: Vaccination status ("T82" for Tetanus and year of basic immunization)
  Fields 8–10: blank
caption: Frontside of a German ID tag from 1961
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