Erkennungsmarke - German ID Tags
- Inka
- Mar 30
- 3 min read
Updated: Apr 1
All soldiers in the German Wehrmacht were issued a metal ID tag when they entered military service, and is called Erkennungsmarke or EKM for short.
The tags were oval discs stamped from thin metal. They were perforated along the middle so they could easily be broken in half.
One part has a single hole, while the other has two. A cord went through the the two holes so it could hang around the neck ( often inside a leather pouch ) and the lower part could be broken off and collected to be sent to the HQ if the soldier fell.
Panzer units got some time into the war a chain instead of cord, and also tags made from stainless steel so that in case of the armoured vehicle burned with the soldiers inside the tags wouldn`t melt or be separated from the soldier.
The tags were stamped with the soldiers personal roll number and the unit he enrolled with, and after 1941 the soldiers bloodgroup.
I love finding erkennungsmarke as they are very interesting pieces of history. They have an iconic design and often have different styles of fonts, and of course they are somewhat researchable, at least on a unit level. And I hope that in the near future it ll be easy to extract info about roll numbers to have the full military history of the wearer.
Here are a couple of helpful links to begin a research:
Since I began metal detecting I have found many EKMs. Actually one of the first good finds I did with my trusted old Fisher F5 detector was a hoard of some 60 or more tags, mostly from Flak- and Luftwaffe ground units. I gathered some of the tags from my collection which I think is interesting to show you. All of these were found in Wehrmacht camps, capitulation sites and internment camps in Norway, and were most probably discarded by the soldiers themselves as they were tired with- and finished with the war.
The five first tags came from the big hoard I found in the beginning of my detecting career:
A Waffenmeister tag is one of the more unusual ones I have found :
A Panzer Abwehr tag :
Gebirgsjäger EKMs :
One and a half HiWi (Hilfswilliger - auxiliary volunteer) tags, the first being a completely field made tag :
Two interesting Prisoner of War tags. The first one has two flowers engraved on the reverse, and the second is a German EKM modified to be a Stalag tag :
This one is the only one not found in Norway, but I wanted to show it because it has been made into a moustache comb. It was sold to me from a collection in Ukraine:
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