Comprehensive research during the last years showed that hot-dip galvanizing of steel members in bridge structures allows significant economic and ecological advantages. It could be demonstrated that the first corrosion protection can last over a bridge's lifetime of 100 years, even in an environment with a high corrosivity, so that no major maintenance measures of the corrosion protection are necessary. Parallel to this research, another innovative solution to increase the efficiency of composite bridges has been developed. Starting with several research projects and a first application in 2003, composite dowel strips offer a very economical solution for shear connections between steel girder and concrete slab in composite bridge constructions. Continuous improvement and further development finally led to a general technical approval by DIBt in Germany. Many bridges containing this new technology are built since then, not only in Germany. However hot-dip galvanizing may not be applied to bridges with composite dowel strips as the effects of the hot-dip galvanizing on the fatigue resistance of flame cut composite dowel strips are unknown. Therefore, the necessary fatigue check according to EC 3-1-9 [2] can currently not be carried out properly. A new research project was launched by the Institutes of Steel Construction of RWTH Aachen University and TU Dortmund University [4], with the aim to analyse the fatigue behaviour of hotdip galvanized composite dowel strips. Furthermore a simplified evidence of absence of cracks according to DASt-Guideline 022 [5] shall be performable by defining a detail class for composite dowel strips. The research work includes extensive experimental and numerical studies on the influences during hot-dip galvanizing and on the fatigue behaviour of galvanized dowel strips. First results of these studies will be presented in this paper as well as the experiences of a first bridge project with hot-dip galvanized composite dowel strips in Germany.