[5]: §12(2)  Occasionally, drivers who adorn their licence plate with a badge of their favourite football club are fined and ordered to restore the original state.

Otherwise this would violate the Vienna Convention on Road Traffic annex 2 which says that letters and numerals are used for registration numbers, but not that spaces or dashes are significant.

[5]: §12(3)  This is a sticker of 45 mm (1+3⁄4 in) diameter, following the area code and bearing, in colours, the seal of the respective German Bundesland with the name of the state and the issuing district authority added in print.

Older stickers were monochrome, black on silver or white, and smaller (35 mm; 1+3⁄8 in), depicting the seal of either the Bundesland or the city district.

This no longer appears in the new format but is often retained,[l] as the space between the geographic identifier and serial letters is a significant character and must be considered when writing down or transmitting a number.

By combining area code and random letters, further possibilities arise, such as a man from Oldenburg named Olaf, born on Christmas Eve, could choose OL-AF 2412.

The owner of a Volkswagen Polo can certainly show VW in the middle section, but neither PO-LO 1995 nor VW-P0 L01 would be possible, as these prefixes are not issued nor may letters and digits be mixed at will.

Deutsche Bahn, after being privatised and relinquishing their Behördenkennzeichen (authority plate) DB, prefers this logo as their middle letters, e. g. F-DB for the Frankfurt office.

[5]: §9(1)  This refers mostly to abbreviations relating to Nazi Germany, such as NS (National Socialism), KZ (Konzentrationslager, concentration camp), HJ (Hitlerjugend, Hitler Youth), SS (Schutzstaffel) and SA (Sturmabteilung).

When the districts of Torgau, Delitzsch and Oschatz merged into Nordsachsen, they combined their initials into TDO, instead of abbreviating Northern Saxony as NS.

[o] Nonetheless, these two-letter codes and the respective numerals 18 and 88, signifying the first and eighth letter of the alphabet, obviously have developed into Nazi symbols.

[citation needed] In 2004 in Nuremberg, a car owner was refused a number plate beginning N-PD because of the connection to the political party NPD.

However, if the plot is supposed to take place in a defined town or region, the audience would expect cars to show codes of that area on their number plates.

The latter task is carried out by the Central Vehicle Register (Zentrales Fahrzeugregister, ZFZR) which is controlled by the Federal Motor Transport Authority (Kraftfahrt-Bundesamt, KBA).

In a scenario without a proper sales contract, the seller may become liable when the buyer commits traffic violations or even criminal acts related to the car or plates.

3 [p] In deviating from the system described above, vehicles registered to federal, state or communal owners can bear licence plates not showing the district and sometimes omitting the middle letters.

Before the legal reforms of 2006, official vehicles such as police, fire fighting and municipal administration did not carry a letter after the sticker, but only the district prefix and a number, such as M-1234.

The various states and realms which made up the German Empire used different prefixes, such as Roman numerals (I representing Prussia, II Bavaria, III Württemberg, etc.)

While the Nazi state expanded and waged war, their bureaucrats applied their systems, including licence plates, to occupied countries or territories.

After 1945, however, the victorious allied forces abolished the system of German licence plates and instead assigned new lettering combinations in their respective occupation zones.

The British Army of the Rhine (BAOR), initially occupation forces, later NATO elements, issued servicemen with plates carrying white letters and numerals on a black background for their personal vehicles.

These codes still stood out, especially as they bore the NATO symbol instead of the EU's circle of stars and the registration seal candidly read Streitkräfte der Vereinigten Staaten von Amerika instead of, e.g. Bayern, Landratsamt Neustadt a.d. Waldnaab.

Since 2006, the vehicles in question bear license plates with regular German area codes, generally referring to the district of their official stationing.

Even before this transition phase, it could be observed that licence plates in GDR scheme were produced with West German typeface on the respective machinery.

Therefore, cities or districts with fewer letters are generally assumed to be bigger and more important whereas three-letter codes tend to be regarded as rural and dull.

[example 17] When the GDR ceased to exist and Germany was reunited in its present size on 3 October 1990, new area codes were issued to the East German districts.

[example 21] A study conducted in 2010–12 produced the result that 72% of the German population would welcome the possibility to use again these abolished area codes whereas only 13% opposed the idea.

[12][67] It was regarded as remarkable that even young people who had never driven a car with such an "old" prefix favoured the idea of this so-called Kennzeichenliberalisierung (licence plate liberalization).

More opposition came from local politicians who maintained they had at last succeeded in unifying their merged districts and healed the wounds of those inhabitants who had to give up "their" prefix.

[71] For that reason, the area code and the respective state seal on a licence plate do not necessarily mean that the vehicle's owner really lives there.