Danzig, 5 Pfennig, 1923

Here's the most recent country I added to my collection. In 1923, the Free City of Danzig had a very small population of 366,730 (compare this to about 30,000,000 in neighbouring Poland). So while this forgotten interwar territory issued quite a few coins, they are not easy to find.



"But wait", somebody asks, "I thought all the tiny German states united in 1871?". So what's a tiny German state doing issuing coins in the 1920s? It all has to do with the creation of Poland after Germany's defeat in World War I. When modern Poland was created in 1918, it was supposed to have access to the sea - but any corridor reaching to the Baltic would cut through ethnic German territory. So Poland got an awkward, spindly little bit of land causing a minimum of disruption, giving it a very small coastline. The large, mostly-German port city of Danzig, bordering this corridor, was not given to either Germany or Poland, but instead remained under the control of the League of Nations. Its economy was close to Poland's and Poland was given certain rights to use the city's port, but regardless, it maintained quasi-independence and issued its own passports, currency, stamps, and the like.

This coin has a mintage of 3,000,000, but it seems likely that many did not survive World War II, as this out-of-place German town was finally incorporated into the Third Reich and its old pre-annexation currency would have been enthusiastically discarded. After the war, Soviet-backed mass deportations and resettlement turned the 95% German town of Danzig into the almost-entirely-Polish town of Gdańsk - interestingly, this city populated by Soviet deportations later became the birthplace of Lech Wałęsa's "Solidarity" movement that led to the fall of communism in Poland.