The Third Reich

The coins on this page were made by Nazi Germany, and several carry the swastika. We catalog them because they are part of the historical record — physical evidence of how a dictatorship stamped its symbols onto the most ordinary objects in a country's daily life. Nothing here celebrates the regime or its ideology. The interest is historical and numismatic only: what these coins were, why they changed, and what they reveal about a state at war and on the way to collapse.

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In January 1933, Adolf Hitler was appointed Chancellor of Germany. Within months the democratic Weimar Republic was dismantled, opposition was crushed, and a one-party dictatorship — the self-proclaimed "Third Reich" — took total control of the state. The years that followed brought rearmament, persecution that escalated into the Holocaust, and, from 1939, the Second World War.

A regime that seized everything seized the coinage too. But it didn't happen all at once. At first the new government simply kept striking the existing Weimar designs — the Reichspfennig small change and the silver Reichsmark rolled on much as before. The transformation came in stages, and you can read the regime's tightening grip in the metal.

By the war years the economy was bent entirely toward the front. As in the First World War, copper, nickel, and other useful metals were pulled out of the coinage and sent to the war effort. The money in German pockets got cheaper and cheaper — until, in the last years, it was little more than holed scraps of zinc. When the Reich fell in 1945, its coinage fell with it, replaced under Allied occupation.

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The currency stayed the Reichsmark, inherited from Weimar and divided into 100 Reichspfennig. What changed was the imagery and, relentlessly, the metal.

The propaganda silver came first. In 1933–1934 the regime issued commemorative silver to mark its own arrival. The Potsdam Garrison Church 2 and 5 Reichsmark coins (1934–1935) referenced the church where the new government staged a ceremony of legitimacy. A Martin Luther issue (1933) and a Friedrich Schiller issue (1934) tied the regime to German cultural figures. These coins carry the eagle-and-swastika the regime adopted, and they were the state announcing itself in silver.

Then came the Hindenburg coinage. After President Paul von Hindenburg died in 1934, his portrait went onto the silver. The 5 Reichsmark (Hindenburg) ran 1935–1939 and the 2 Reichsmark (Hindenburg) 1936–1939, and on these the eagle now grips a wreathed swastika — the regime's emblem made fully official on the everyday silver coin. There was even a one-year aluminum-only 50 Reichspfennig and a redesigned set of bronze and brass small coins (1, 2, 5, 10 Reichspfennig) from 1936 carrying the same eagle-and-swastika.

And then the war ground the coinage down. From 1939 silver effectively stopped. The useful metals were stripped out. By 1940–1941 the small coins were being struck in zinc, including holed military pieces (5 and 10 Reichspfennig) with a large swastika and an eagle's head. These thin, dull, rust-prone coins are the physical signature of a war economy in trouble — money made of whatever was left. As the Reich collapsed in 1945, the Allied occupation began issuing its own Reichspfennig coins (some explicitly "Allied Occupation" types from 1945–1948), the first money of a defeated and divided Germany.

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Read the Third Reich's coins in order and they trace the regime's whole arc — confidence, consolidation, war, collapse — in metal.

1933–1934: the regime announces itself. The earliest coins are propaganda in silver. The 2 and 5 Reichsmark (Martin Luther) of 1933 and the 2 and 5 Reichsmark (Friedrich Schiller) of 1934 borrowed German cultural giants for legitimacy. The 2 and 5 Reichsmark (Potsdam Garrison Church) of 1934–1935 commemorated the staged ceremony that dressed the dictatorship in the robes of tradition. These are the regime's calling cards.

1935–1939: the swastika becomes the everyday coin. With Hindenburg's death, his face went onto the silver: the 5 Reichsmark (Paul von Hindenburg) (1935–1939) and the 2 Reichsmark (Paul von Hindenburg) (1936–1939), both showing the eagle clutching a wreathed swastika. The small change was reissued to match — the bronze 1 and 2 Reichspfennig and the aluminum-bronze 5 and 10 Reichspfennig from 1936, plus the single-year aluminum 50 Reichspfennig of 1935 — every denomination now carrying the regime's emblem. This is the moment the swastika stops being a special-issue mark and becomes the ordinary money in everyone's hand.

1940–1945: scrap-metal money. The war emptied the coinage of value. Silver vanished; copper and nickel were requisitioned. What remained was zinc — including the holed 5 and 10 Reichspfennig military coinage of 1940–1941, with a big swastika on one side and an eagle's head above the hole on the other. These are crude, light, easily corroded coins, and that's exactly the point: they are what a country striking money for total war could spare. The era closes with the Allied Occupation Reichspfennig issues of 1945–1948 — including a 10-Reichspfennig type collectors nickname the "Slavic seven" for the shape of its numerals — struck as the Reich's own coinage was swept away.

These coins are collected as history, and the honest reason they hold attention is that they make an abstract horror concrete. A swastika in a textbook is a symbol; a swastika worn smooth on a coin that passed through thousands of hands is a fact about how a regime saturated ordinary life. Collectors and historians study Third Reich coinage the way they study any wartime artifact — as evidence, kept and understood, not admired.

The numismatic interest is real and specific. You can date the regime's arc by its metal: confident silver early, the swastika spreading onto the everyday coin by 1936, then the slide into zinc as the war drained the country. Hold a 1936 silver Hindenburg next to a 1941 holed zinc piece and the whole trajectory — from a dictatorship flush with power to one scraping for resources — is right there in your two hands. The earliest issues that still carried over Weimar designs, the single-year types like the 1935 aluminum 50 Reichspfennig, and the various military and occupation pieces all give collectors precise, datable markers of a fast-moving and catastrophic period.

A word on the market, because it matters. Coins bearing Nazi symbols are sold and displayed in many countries strictly as historical objects, and some jurisdictions restrict their sale or display. Serious collectors and institutions handle them with that context front and center: these are studied to understand and remember, never to glorify. That framing — evidence, not endorsement — is the only one that belongs on a coin from this era.