Although I mostly have WWII Erkennungsmarken, it seemed natural to me that a few of its predecessors would help round out my collection some- so over the years I acquired examples of its WWI and earlier form, back to, more-or-less, the first ‘dog tag’ the German military ever used.

Jean Höidal reports in his book Deutsche Erkennungsmarken des Zweiten Weltkrieges (Patzwall, 1999) that the first reported modern use of identity tags was in 1862, during the American Civil War, although I have heard that Leonidas’ Spartans at Thermopylae wrote their names on little sticks which they tied to their arms so their bodies could be identified- so the practice may be far older than we might think.

For Germany it was the battle of Königgrätz in 1866, where shockingly only 429 of 8893 fallen Prussian officers and men could be named, making clear the need for some form of durable identification. I read someplace (can’t recall where) that one high officer was prompted to say something to the effect that every dog in Berlin has to have an identification tag, and he was angry that so many of his brave men were left nameless. Potentially this could have been the origin of the term ‘dog tag’- that soldiers were following dogs in having to wear an identification tag.