Opinion On Nazi Coins?

Of course not, go for it! It's an important part of history. I own a lot of coins from the fascist period in Italy, and I'm not a Mussolini sympathizer. What country did your grandfather fight for during WWII?

There is only as much stigma as you want to have.

I know some people don't want to own these coins because of their history, but that's a personal choice.

It's perfectly valid to own Nazi coins, just as it is to own Russian coins from the times of the pogroms, Attila the Hun's coins, the time of the Khmer Rouge, or any bit of history that people regard as terrible.

You might be collecting German coins, coins with a swastika (lots of Greek coins), coins showing dictators.

I've got plenty of Nazi Germany Silver. I know a lot of people who do too. I say, go for it!

No....not at all.
I own an 1000 won note illegally printed by North Korea during the Korean War, a big tragedy in Korean history. Does that make me a Communist? No.

Nazi coins are owned by many, many collectors that have absolutely no problem collecting them. The coins represent such a tragic period in the history of mankind that should and must be remembered and not repeated again. So as we are preserving important pieces of history, I consider collecting Nazi coins (or any coins or paper money from the rule of a hideous man) not something of a taboo.

However, people that have personal connections or family connections to the tragedy may not want to collect them, because they come from the period of the tragedy and do not want to collect them or preserve them as pieces of history but destroy them as a piece of the Nazi rule.

But that's what we should do as a collector, preserve history through coins. So don't over-think their meaning and the legality of owning them to an extreme degree. I say go ahead if you wish.

I was going to comment but...
What they said.
lol not much else to add to it.

It is important to have the debate, if only in your own mind - and it is a debate held many times on the forum before. Here's a really old thread. And another, newer thread.

The general consensus is that as long as neither you nor the people you are buying the coins from are intending to glorify or look back at the "good old days when these guys were still around", then collecting them is fine. We certainly don't want to delete or obliterate the memory of their regime completely, as doing so simply allows later generations to wonder whether the Nazis might not have been so bad after all.

Keeping Nazi coins as part of a broader collection of German or world coins also offers the opportunity to glimpse what life was like for people living under the regime. As I said in one of those old threads:


If this is the kind of attitude that collecting Nazi coins engenders within you, then by all means it should be encouraged rather than discouraged.

But on the other hand, coin collecting should be enjoyable as well as educational. If all you can feel when you hold a Nazi coin is the suffering dealt to the "inferior peoples" by this regime, perhaps including members of your own family, then perhaps owning some Nazi coins is not for you personally.

For those that own Nazi coins and are reluctant to feel as though you are profiting by them if/when you sell them, this also is an important question you must answer for yourself. There are always museums and charitable organizations who can accept donated Nazi items and either display them or sell them appropriately and respectfully, if you feel you cannot do so yourself in good conscience.

Thanks for the reassurance everyone!





My Grandpa was in the U.S. Army and arrived towards the end of the war and mainly served in Austria and Germany and helped liberate at least one of the Jewish camps. Although it's something he still doesn't like talking about, understandably. He's still alive and well at age 88 and walks 3 miles a day with his wife of 60 years (grandma).