Nazi Coin

Zaggy,

That's very interesting. As I collect coins from WWII, those two coins would be an interesting addition, since they "used to be" WWII coins.

Are there any numbers showing how much of the 1951 silver coins had silver from Third Reich coins in them? I suppose that would probably be pretty difficult to determine?

Thanks to everyone who posted in this thread, and thanks to "mohammad" for starting it. It's been very informative. I will be doing a lot of "copy and paste" into my coin info notebook!

First, Chris you're right! the 1951 2DM's were Cupro-Nickel - being focused primarily on Third Reich, I'm always messing up the fact the 'new' 2DM's WEREN'T Silver!

Well if you want to get REALLY technical, SOME of the 1951 5DM were made from the Third Reich 2DM and 5RM... Some of the Third Reich 2 and 5RM were made from the Weimar 1M, 2M, 3M and 5M. Some of the Weimar 1M, 2M, 3M & 5M were made from the Kaiserreich era 20Pf (there was one (or two?) silver ones), 50Pf(+1/2M), 1M, 2M, 3M, 5M... And before that, I'm sure some of the earlier German State and HRE silver was recovered..

I suspect that some of the Modern German Silver coins are probably made from Silver recovered from DM's!

Its a simple fact that when coins are demonetised, they're recovered and the materials used again. Maybe this reuse is for weapons (as in the case of Nickel, Alpha-Bronze and Aluminium-Bronze in WW2), maybe to recover precious metals (as many countries did with their gold coins when material values exceeded face) or maybe just to make the next generation of coin (happens all the time with Au, Ag, Cu, Al, Ni, Zn, Fe etc, in pretty much every country of the world!).

In the case of German coinage, I know a lot of the recovery from the formation of the Empire in 1871 through to early 1944, was done by Degussa (an abbreviation of Deutsche Gold und Silber-Scheideanstalt, located in Frankfurt am Main); whether Degussa participated in the early BdL/BRD recovery, I have not yet discovered...

Schmidty: I have no definitive figures on ANY of the Silver recoveries with the exception of some BALLPARK figures for the late 1930's recovery of Weimar silver types.

THUS in summing up...

Your 5DM may very well have lived many lives before becoming that 5DM... Perhaps it used to be a 2 Reichsmark and before that a 3 Reichsmark and before that a DREI MARK and before that a 50Pfg and before that some of Thaler and before that some sort of HRE coin... By this stage, we could easily be back in the 15th Century. It may have an even more diverse history if the coin originated in another country (maybe the country was invaded or trade took the coin away from home), but the simple fact is, the precious metal in any coin may have been in circulation for hundreds or years!

Cool, huh?

Ah, its the €10 that are Silver! Not being into €URO I couldnt for the life of me remember which ones are made of what; else I would have included that in my rant above :)