๐ How Rare Are You in Germany?
๐ฉ๐ช Genetic Landscape of Germany
Germany sits in the heart of Central Europe where Nordic, Celtic, and Slavic genetic influences converge. Northern Germany (Schleswig-Holstein, Lower Saxony) shows strong Scandinavian markers with very high rates of blue eyes and blonde hair. Southern Bavaria has more Alpine and Continental features. The east-west genetic divide, shaped by centuries of different migration patterns, is still detectable today. Germany's height average (~180cm/5'11" for men) is among the tallest in Europe. Turkish and Middle Eastern immigration since the 1960s has added significant new genetic diversity, particularly in urban areas.
Surnames here work almost like coordinates. One trade produced Schmidt in the north, Schmitt in Hesse, Schmitz along the Rhine and Schmid in Swabia and Bavaria, so the spelling alone points to a region. Rarer names cluster tighter still, sometimes in a single valley, because the country spent centuries as hundreds of separate states and people mostly married close to home. Dialect lines follow the same logic: the split between Low German in the north and the High German dialects to the south goes back to a sound shift in the early Middle Ages. Later movement shows up in the names too, since coalfield recruiting drew Polish-speaking workers from Masuria and Prussian Poland into the Ruhr, and their surnames are still thick on the ground in Gelsenkirchen and Dortmund.
๐ชช Your eye colour is a legal field on your ID card
German law prints eye colour on the identity card. ยง 5 of the Personalausweisgesetz lists what the card may carry visibly, and the list is exhaustive: height is item 7 and Farbe der Augen, the colour of the eyes, is item 8. Hair colour is not on it. ยง 1 of the same act makes a valid ID card compulsory for Germans from the age of 16, and a passport, which may be held instead, records the eye colour too โ so very nearly every German adult is carrying an eye-colour entry in a pocket.
It is no use as a statistic. The passport regulation says the colour is not measured by technical means, and that the field should hold only colour terms โ basic colour names, their light and dark shades, and mixtures โ without setting out any fixed vocabulary to pick from. Nor can the entry be amended afterwards: a later change of the eye colour in a passport is unzulรคssig, not permitted, and if the entry has become wrong because the colour changed, the passport is invalid and a new one has to be issued. Height is written down from what the applicant states, in centimetres. Nothing here is a count, which is why the eye-colour table on this page is an estimate โ see Data Sources.
๐๏ธ Eye Color
| Blue | 39% |
| Green | 16% |
| Hazel | 15% |
| Brown | 25% |
| Gray | 5% |
๐ Hair Color
| Brown | 35% |
| Blonde | 30% |
| Black | 15% |
| Dark Brown | 12% |
| Red | 3% |
| Other | 5% |
๐ฉธ Blood Type
| O+ | 37% |
| A+ | 36% |
| B+ | 9% |
| O- | 6% |
| A- | 6% |
| AB+ | 4% |
| B- | 1% |
| AB- | 1% |
Trait frequencies on this page come from public and institutional datasets โ see Data Sources.
🧮 Calculate Your Rarity in Germany
Pick your eye colour, hair colour and blood type. The calculator uses Germany's own figures from the tables above, not world averages.
This is an estimate, not a measurement. It multiplies three national frequencies as if they were independent, and they are not: eye and hair colour share pigmentation genes, so a combination that tends to run together, such as blue eyes with blonde hair, is more common than the multiplication suggests, while one that rarely does, such as blue eyes with black hair, is rarer. Blood type is independent of both. The frequencies are national averages from public datasets — see Data Sources.
That number describes the body you were born with. Fraeon, our other site, does the same arithmetic for the part you chose: the films, series, games, books, anime and manga you have actually finished. Start your log →
๐ The day a German surname could become two
Until 1 May 2025 a married couple in Germany could not take a genuine double surname as their shared married name. Since that date they can. The Justice Ministry's own examples are Arnheim-Bauer and Bauer-Arnheim, with the hyphen or without it, and a child can be given a birth name built the same way from both parents' surnames.
The same reform wrote three naming traditions into the Civil Code. ยง 1617f BGB allows the gender-adapted form of a surname that Sorbian tradition uses for women, Kralowa from Kral; the ministry notes the option is open beyond the Sorbian people where the adaptation matches the origin of the name and another state's law provides for it. ยง 1617g allows a child of the Frisian Volksgruppe a patronymic, a surname derived from a parent's given name: Johannsen from a father called Johann. ยง 1617h allows a child of the Danish minority a double birth name with no hyphen, a close relative's surname first โ a grandparent's, say โ and a parent's second, as in Albertsen Christensen.
๐ The height figure is an answer, not a measurement
Germany's official height numbers come from the Mikrozensus, the survey in which about 1% of the population โ close to 800,000 people in just under 400,000 households โ is asked each year about how it lives. Answering the Mikrozensus is compulsory, and nobody can be excused from it. Body height is the exception: it sits in the health section, which comes round only once every four years, and those questions are freiwillig, voluntary.
In the 2025 round 51% of the people asked gave a height and weight at all, and every answer is a Selbstauskunft โ what the respondent says, not what a tape measure found. On that basis the Federal Statistical Office puts the average at 1.79 m for men and 1.66 m for women. So the German average height is not a measurement of Germany. It is half a sample's self-description, collected once every four years.
โญ Rare Facts About Germany
Which of these German numbers has an institution behind it
Population: Statistisches Bundesamt (Destatis) โ about 83.5 million people at the end of 2025, roughly 100,000 fewer than a year earlier. Height: Destatis again, Mikrozensus 2025 averages of 1.79 m for men and 1.66 m for women, both self-reported. Blood type: the German Red Cross blood donation services, which publish their shares as shares of the population and cite no source of their own. Eye and hair colour: estimates with no institution behind them, as Data Sources says. ID card and passport entries: ยง 5 PAuswG and the Passverwaltungsvorschrift. Name law: ยงยง 1617f to 1617h BGB. Last checked September 2026.