Evaluation of the WWII German ID tag system

[Jean-Loup]

Last year I had to write a paper for my medical school, so decided to make the process less painfull by writting about something that I actualy have a real interest in. So I ended up writting about the exhumation of German soldiers I found in Villeneuve in 2006. For this report, I included an 'Evaluation of the WWII German ID tag system', that I am reproducing below. I always found the German system very strange, and decided to summerize what some of the problems were.

I would be very interested to know what some of the forum dog tag specialists and collectors think of my analysis. I suspect there are a faire number of mistakes as well (keep in mind this was not written for collectors, but for the general public)? Anyways, I think this can be an interesting discussion.


5.2. Evaluation of the German World War 2 identification tag system<O</O
During the identification of the soldiers found in the grave, 3 major deficiencies in the World War 2 German ID tag system came to light. These deficiencies were, in order of decreasing importance: many men were not wearing their tag, the tags did not resist well to burial, and the coding system used proved problematic. We will now discuss each of these problems in more depth.<O</O
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No tag was discovered at all for 7 of the 14 bodies. Although some tags may have been pilfered, it would seem, according to wartime photos, that many men did not wear their tags around their necks as they were instructed to. All soldiers should wear their ID tags around their neck at all times, particularly if they are present in a war zone or if they are using air or sea transportation. Specific instructions should be given to not store ID tags in clothing or equipment, as the chances are great that the body may become separated from these items in case of death.<O</O
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The ID tags were made of aluminum and zinc. Both these metals have low resistance to heat (problematic in case of fire), and both have poor long-term resistance to corrosion. Although aluminum is reputed not to oxidize, if it is placed in adverse environmental conditions, it may become completely corroded and change into a brittle mass of aluminum oxide on which any inscriptions will be impossible to read. Zinc is more resistant, but also becomes damaged over time. One tag in the grave was completely oxidized, and three had been damaged severely, but were still readable (see photo). ID tags should thus be made out of a substance that is both highly resistant to heat and to burial, such as stainless steel.<O</O

[Jean-Loup]

German ID tags were coded in a very peculiar way, apparently in order to simplify their production by local military units. The inscriptions on the tag consisted of the name of the unit the soldier did his basic training in, and a personal number within that unit. As an illustration, the ID tag of body 10 had the following inscriptions: Stamm.Kp.G.E.B.XXX XXXX. With this system, absolutely no recognizable personal information about the soldier was present on the tag. This had several highly damaging side effects.<O</O
Firstly it caused some soldiers to accidently exchange their ID tags, as the tags were so impersonal. We have witnessed many cases when a body was found with the tag of a soldier who survived the war.<O</O

[Jean-Loup]

Secondly, there is absolutely no redundancy in the information on the tag (if only half the tag is buried with the body, as per German Army regulations). Thus, a single number becoming unreadable can be enough to make the entire tag undecipherable. Finally, the code numbers used on the tags can only be deciphered with the appropriate code books. As can be expected, some of these books were destroyed during the war or have been misplaced, making the corresponding tags absolutely undecipherable . This was the case for one of the tags from the grave.<O</O
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The ideal ID tag should thus contain redundant information, part of which is clearly identifiable by the soldier and anybody else, for example his name. This will prevent tags from being accidentally interchanged, and will enable the tag to be used even if some characters are unreadable, or if code books are unavailable. <O</O
The problems highlighted in the previous discussion caused 7 tags out of 14 to be missing, and caused 2 of the 7 retrieved tags to be unusable. Thus, a total of 9 out of 14 men, could not be identified due to a badly designed and enforced ID tag system. Reports about other exhumations of German soldiers have shown identical problems, with alarmingly high numbers of tags being missing, corroded, undecipherable or belonging to live soldiers.<O</O
Nowadays, the importance of ID tags may seem secondary due to advances in DNA technology and other means of identification. But one should not underestimate the usefulness of an effective and cheap ID tag system, nor underestimate the possible problems that can arise with other means of identification, such as high prices or the lack of a comparison database for DNA or odontology. As an example, we will mention the situation concerning the identification of bodies of the 1991-95 Homeland War in <?xml:namespace prefix = st1 ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:smarttags" /><st1:country-region w:st="on"><ST1Croatia</ST1</st1:country-region>. Although high priority was given to this work by the Croatian government, with databases being prepared immediately and the most modern forensic identification methods being used, a small but non-negligible proportion of the recovered bodies remains unidentified [13].<O</O

[Jean-Loup]

Sorry for the editing of much of the information from the pictures, but I have my reasons...

Now, to put my opinion of WWII German tags in more simple terms: I think it was a typicaly German 'overdesigned' system; making things much more complicated then they needed to be. The use of coded information only on the dog tags was quite simply stupid, and asking for trouble.
This trouble occured for sure, and has probably caused thousands if not dozens of thousands of men to remain unidentified!

Jean-Loup

[Jean-Loup]

PS: I forgot to mention, for those who do not understand German, that the document scans I posted all say something like: "The owner of this tag is still alive, the body must thus remain unknown" or "This tag is not present in the identificaion tag list, thus: unknown"

[mr.dogtag]

Hi J-L,
I would say very good conclusions. The system was overdone in IIWW. IWW system was far better as mentioned name and address and thus allowed to contact family by anyone in case of death.
In IIWW for unknown reasons German army prefered to disclose the unit info and keep personal information of soldier confidential. This seems to be an absurd as unit number/data says far more to an enemy than the fact some one is called for instance Hans Globke.
The rate of dog tags lost in action is according to German statistics around 20 % (!). Every unit carried prestamped replacement tags in number equivalent of 20-30 % of the soldiers in the unit. I know some RK winners who lost and replaced their tags up to 4 times during the war.
This creates a great mess in documentation.
The material isn't perfect either. US tags made of steel were far more durable agains corrosion than aluminum or zinc alloy.
Still I like German tags most out of any other tags ( well, with exception of tags of Polish war heroes and high ranking officers).
BTW - Polish tag mod. 1931 won an International Red Cross contest for the best ID tag sollution in 1928 in Geneve. The same design is still used by Swiss, Norwegian and many other armies of the world.
Rgds
Al

[Ironcrown]

I agree with you, Jean-Loup.
German dogtags are sometimes very hard to read after more than 60 years, and if they are legible, the owner's name can be identified by the Wast only, after a long search that not always will give a positive response.
You wrote that dogtags were made in aluminium and zink; well, they were also made in (not stainless) steel, and in this case identification can be even harder if not impossible!

I found something like 30 US Army dogtags in the ground (all in ww2 trash dumps, so never in connection to a fallen soldier) and they were always perfectly legible even without a cleaning, whatever they were in Brass, Monel or Stainless. Probably the american dogtags are the best ones used in WW2.
About other countries dogtags that I know, the italian brass made dogtags were fairly good too (but not the 2 earlier models adopted in WW1 and still used in WW2), while russian and hungarian ones were almost useless as they had the informations written in a piece of paper put in a small container that not always protected the label well enough.

[Jean-Loup]

Thanks for your thoughts guys. I had never heard about this Red Cross competition for dog tags, with the Polish winning. Could you post a photo of a WW2 era Polish tag?

As mentioned, the italian ones are pretty good as well. For those who are not familiar with them, I am posting one below. They are made with two overlaping thickenesses of brass/copper with personal info of the owner writen on each piece. In case of death, one layer was removd, the other stayed with the body. I would ay te main disadvatange is bad resistance to heat, and possibly also bad reistance to certain extreme burail conditions because the brass is very thin.

The US tags were exellent, the only negative point maybe being the fact that there were two (thus noisy); and not just one to be brocken into two.

What do most armies have nowawayds: two tag, or one tag to be broken?

The Russian sytem was of course terrible, with only a piece of paper in a bakelite tube... Bad resistance to burial, no double information, easy to loose and mix up... I also have one of those.

[Ironcrown]

Here's my italian dogtag, found last years in the ground. You can see that, even if a bit corroded, all the informations are still legible.

The next pic shows two older patterns of italian dogtags. The zink tag was written with a special ink and sewn inside the tunic, the other (this is not a dug one of course!)contained a small piece of paper. Both were obviously unsuited to an identification after years in the ground but were still in use in ww2 as well

I heard that some german soldiers (but very few) received also stainless steel dogtags. I don't know if this story is true, but I was told that mainly Panzer crews received them because these tags could resist to the high temperature of a burning tank. These were probably the best dogtags they could receive in the Wehrmacht.

[Jean-Loup]

It is true that the Wehrmacht also had stainless steel dog tags. I aso heard they were mostly for aircrew and panzer crews, but have never verified this. The first time I saw a stainles steel German ID tag, I thought it was a joke and a very poor fake. It was ground dug, but entirely new and shiny, and the stamping looked strange. I have a very poor photo of it below (circled in red). Also note an other ground dug tag with the string still present: the string was made of Nylon so resisted burial.

Regarding the early dog tag systems, what we have to keep in mind is that in the past, people didnt expect the body of a soldier to be returned or be buried in a marked grave. All that was expected was to know if the person was still alive or not. The concet of having an eternal grave for each soldier only started in WW1.

JL

[Henry Jones]

I think the german dog tag system was realised, because it was very cheap and simple to produce the EM. Every replacement unit needs only one stamp set to press the unit and the continous personal number. They had not to change every letter at the stamp for each soldier for their name and adresse.

Today it is certainly a problem to identify each soldier, accordingly to the named things in this thread. Near information about the EM and the system you will also find in the Army regulations and terms. Also you can use the Höidal for further information.

Flying personal of the Luftwaffe and tank crews got fireproof EM for better identification.

But nice work, J-L. I am very interested to see your complete medical paper

[Jean-Loup]

Yes, this is also the explanation I understand: "German ID tags were coded in a very peculiar way, apparently in order to simplify their production by local military units."

However, it seems that the price to pay for this little 'simplification' ended up being very big, both because if a tag was lost, it made a complicated situation, and also because of all the unidentified men.

How were the ID tags actualy made? The unit set all the required letters together in one single set, and could then stamp several tags in a row wiwthout changing anything? But it seems to me that when you have two tags of a single unit, you can see small differences in the alignement of the letters for each tag, as if each one was done one at a time.
Is there any picture showing how they wwere made?

If you would like to see the paper, send me your email address by PM.

JL

[Henry Jones]

Hi J-L,

for the EM production you should ask the user "Frontalschaden" here in this forum. He is expert in these things. But I think there are different ways to press the tags. In the "Höidal" are only an picture from pressing the blood group in the dog tag with an hand marking punch.

You got PN!

Regards,
Alex