German Coins

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Origins of Germany
The general area which is known today by Anglophones as 'Germany' was known to the Romans as 'Germania', although the area classified as Germania by the Romans is larger than that of the modern nation state. Germania was located on the very frontier of the Roman Empire, and Rome struggled at various times to conquer, pacify and contain the savage and warlike barbarians dwelling the forests and hills here.
In 9 AD, the Romans suffered a catastrophic and shocking loss in the Tuetoburg Forrest, which saw 3 Roman Legions completely wiped out and survivors captured, enslaved, mutilated, eaten and/or ritually sacrificed in a wild-eyed fashion to the appease the wrath of the Germanic tribesmen's evil native gods. (Roman written accounts on the fate of the Roman fallen and captured may of course be slightly biased).
Rome never fully succeeded in subduing Germania or its tribes. Although many of its tribesmen known as Foederati did serve in the Roman Army over the course of its history.

Germany during the Dark Ages
As Roman Rule in the west collapsed, German tribes began to migrate westwards, invading and conquering the under defended territories in Britannia, Gaul and Hispania. These Tribesmen, including the Franks and Saxons, amongst others, were themselves under pressure to flee from their ancestral homelands due to the expansion of conquering eastern nomads, such as the Huns, who were cutting a swathe across the Steppes and into Germany and the Balkans at the time.
Between the 5th and 9th Centuries, the Franks, who had established themselves in modern France, pushed back East and began to conquer parts of Germany or else reduce the local peoples to vassalage. The Carolingian Empire reached its zenith under the Emperor Charlemagne, who had himself crowned as 'Emperor of the Romans' in 800 by Pope Leo III.

Eastern Francia
The coronation of Charlemagne as 'Emperor of the Romans' laid the foundations of the Holy Roman Empire. After the death of Charlemagne's son, Louis the Pious in 840, the Carolingian Empire was divided into West, Middle and Eastern Francia. One of these, Louis the German, took control of Eastern Francia. Under the Ottonian Dynasty, over 100 years later, the King of East Francia was crowned Emperor (and successor of Charlemagne) by Pope John XII in 962. Otto I had fought a series of campaigns throughout the German states, Western Francia (France) and Northern Italy, and had strengthened the authority of the Church at the expense of the Nobility. The Holy Roman Empire thus emerged.

The Holy Roman Empire
The Holy Roman Empire (The First Reich) was one of the great powers of Eastern Europe, however, as time progressed, power within the German states became more and more decentralised. In spite of the origins of the Holy Roman Empire emerging from giving the clergy more power, the Holy Roman Emperors of the late middle ages often found themselves in conflict with the Pope, at times sponsoring their own Popes and anti-Popes, often finding themselves ex-communicated or restored depending on the political situation at the time.
In 1526, The Habsburg Dynasty rose to power and would rule the Empire for the remainder of its existence.
The devastating 30 Years War, fought largely between Catholic powers (including the Holy Roman Emperor and his Allies) and Protestant powers (allied with Catholic France and the Muslim Ottomans); vastly reduced the power of the Emperor, and those German states existing outside of Austria effectively became autonomous after 1648.
The Holy Roman Empire was formally abolished in 1804 following the defeat of Emperor Francis II by Napoleon. Francis II would however, unilaterally declare himself as Emperor Francis I of the Austrian Empire, and at this point, the histories of Austria and the rest of Germany largely diverge.

Napoleon and the Confederation of the Rhine
Napoleon overran most of Germany during his conquest of Eastern and Central Europe. He was however, welcomed as a liberator by many Germans who chafed under semi-feudal rule. Napoleon established the Confederation of the Rhine in 1806, compromising most German states except for Austria and Prussia. This was effectively a loose confederation of German states with Napoleon as its overall protector. The Confederation collapsed in 1813 however, as Napoleon retreated from his disastrous campaign against Russia.

German Confederation
The successor to the Confederation was the German Confederation, an even looser confederation of independent states nominally led by Austria. The revolutions of 1848 had been hallmarked by a rise in pan-German nationalism as well as opposition to the powers of the nobility, however, although the 1848 revolutions had seen a measure of reform within many of the German states (not to mention the accession of Franz-Josef in Austria, who deposed his Uncle Ferdinand I as a result of the revolutionary turmoil). They did little to bring any closer union between the German States.

German Unification Although Austria, led by the Habsburgs, seemed like the natural state to be the centre of any future unified German state, there were two major complications: The Austrian Empire included many lands that were not German, and the status of these lands in any unified German states was not clear (many pan-German nationalists did not want non-Germans included in a future united Germany). The Second major complication was Prussia, another powerful German state that did not see itself as any less great than Austria. Prussia fought a short war with Denmark in 1864 wrested control of Schleswig and Holstein from Denmark and brought them under Prussian control. The Prussians, led by their redoubtable chancellor, Otto von Bismarck, actively worked to exclude Austria from any future German state. This culminated in the Austro-Prussian War of 1866. Prussia defeated Austria and its allies and established the North German Confederation, dominated by Prussia.
This was however, merely the first step towards a united Germany, and in 1870, Prussia went to war against France. By January of 1871, France had all but been completely defeated, and Wilhelm I, King of Prussia was proclaimed as William I, Emperor of Germany. In addition to the states of the North German Confederation, Bavaria, Wurttemberg, Baden and Hesse also joined the Empire, in addition to Alsace and Lorraine, which had been seized from France as a result of the war.

Imperial Germany
Imperial Germany (the Second Reich) was now the most powerful country in continental Europe. It was effectively a monarchical autocracy, but with some hallmarks of democracy, such as an elected Parliament. However, most of the executive power still remained with the Kaiser and the respective monarchs of the other German states, and Royal Power was probably more comparable to that in England during the late 17th Century than in contemporary Britain. Bismarck now endeavoured to consolidate the gains that had been made. He worked cautiously not to antagonise the countries that had been defeated by Prussia (Denmark, France and Austria) in the course of unifying Germany, as well as the other great power of Europe, Britain. However, Wilhelm I's grandson, Wilhelm II would effectively undo all of this in his quest for further German glory.

Wilhelm II and the Unravelling of Bismarck’s Policies
Bismarck had not expected Wilhelm I's grandson to ascend the throne in his own lifetime, but Frederich III was diagnosed with a terminal cancer shortly before the death of Wilhelm I in 1888, and thus only reigned for a few months. Wilhelm II proved to be more erratic and authoritarian than either his father or grandfather had been, and was hostile to the cautious policies of Bismarck. While Bismarck hoped to work towards consolidating the gains Prussia and Germany had made in the third quarter of the 19th Century, Wilhelm II sought further glory for his Empire. Bismarck resigned as Chancellor in 1890, predicting that if Germany continued on the path that it was going on under the present Kaiser, the country that he had worked hard to create would be destroyed in a future great war. Following Bismarck’s resignation, Wilhelm II failed to renew the Reinsurance treaty with Russia, allying Germany and Russia at the expense of France. As a result, France (whom Bismarck had endeavoured to keep diplomatically isolated) made overtures and secured an alliance with Russia with an 1894 treaty. By the 1880s, Germany had overtaken Britain as an industrial power, and sought to build a navy to rival that of Britain's. Britain was naturally alarmed at the rise of Germany as an economic and especially a naval power, and relations between the two countries deteriorated as a result. As far as Britain was concerned, she needed a Navy larger than the next two largest combined in order to protect itself as well as its large and far flung overseas Empire.
Germany was primarily a continental power with a relatively small coastline. Even a Navy half the size of the Royal Navy could be a serious threat to Britain's security in its own waters.
And so an entente cordiale was signed between France and Britain in 1909. An 1879 Alliance with Austria-Hungary remained in place, but Germany under Wilhelm II had by the start of 1914, found itself surrounded on three sides by a hostile pro-French alliance, a situation that Bismarck had worked hard to avoid.

World War I
A series of events following the assassination of Franz Ferdinand, heir to the Austrian throne in August 1914 led to the outbreak of World War I. Germany found itself threatened with invasion by the vast Russian Army in the East and the considerable French Army in the West. Germany, following a plan developed years before, known as the Schleiffen plan (after its creator, Field Marshal Alfred von Schlieffen) invaded France via Belgium in an attempt to knock her quickly out of the war before the Russian steamroller had a chance to rumble its way to Berlin. However, Britain entered the war on the grounds of the violation of Belgian Neutrality, and the Germans were stopped and pushed back into Belgium. What followed was 4 horrific years of trench warfare. Although Germany succeeded in knocking post-revolutionary Russia out of the War in 1918, the arrival of the Americans following their own declaration of war the previous year turned the balance decisively in favour of the allies, and Germany was defeated by November 1918. Wilhelm II abdicated and fled, leading to the declaration of German Federal Republic at Weimer.

Inter War Years
The Treaty of Versailles, signed in 1919, was a harsh peace. In addition to losing Alsace and Lorraine, which were returned to France, Germany was forced to agree to pay reparations of the 2012 sterling equivalent of £217 billion. Germany suffered catastrophic hyperinflation and unemployment during the interwar period which happened so rapidly that it is said that workers often hurried to the shops with wheelbarrows full of increasingly worthless currency in order to get to the shops before prices rose again. Extreme poverty was commonplace and widespread. In addition, because Allied troops had not occupied any German land prior to the armistice of November 1918, there was a belief that the Germans could have won the war, and that the peace treaty had therefore been a 'stab in the back' by treacherous German leaders influenced by Marxists and Jews. This belief began to take root in the hearts and minds of much of the German populace, with tragic results.

Nazi Germany and World War II
This potent atmosphere of extreme hardship, anti-Semitism and ignorance, led to the rise of Adolf Hitler and the Nazis in the 1930s. Although the Nazis never received the majority of the vote in any popular elections, they gained enough support in the Reichstag for Hitler to be appointed as Chancellor by Reich President Paul von Hindenburg in 1933. Following an act of arson at the Reichstag, which the Nazi government blamed on a Dutch communist activist Marinus van der Lubbe, the Nazi dominated Reichstag passed an enabling act giving the government dictatorial powers.
Hindenburg died the following year and Hitler proclaimed himself as Fuehrer of the German Reich (known as the Third Reich). Over the next 6 years, the Nazis consolidated their hold over Germany and embarked upon a campaign of populism, racial nationalism, socialism (involving the centralisation of state control, restriction of private enterprise and the revolutionary destruction of any institution or tradition that stood in the way of Hitler's new world order) as well as military expansionism.
After re-militarising the Rhineland in 1936, annexing the Austria and the Sudetenland in Czechoslovakia in 1938 with little in the way of meaningful opposition by either France or Britain, Hitler invaded Poland in September 1939, not seriously expecting either power to declare war as a result. However, he was proven wrong, and Britain and France did finally declare war in order to try and stop Hitler from taking over the whole of Europe.
Nazi Germany did well at first, and managed to finish conquering Poland (with the help of the USSR, who took the eastern portion of Poland for themselves) and then conquered Denmark, Norway, the Netherlands, Belgium and France, which was defeated by June 1940. Although Hitler failed to defeat British airpower as a precursor to invading Britain, he was otherwise triumphant everywhere else. In June 1941, Hitler invaded the Soviet Union, and as in land campaigns elsewhere in Europe, succeeded in rapidly defeating everything that stood in his way, at least initially. Hitler's forces were stopped by the Russian winter from reaching all of their objectives, and this, along with the entrance of Americans into the war late that year, eventually saw the tide turn against Nazi Germany. By May 1945, Germany had been defeated on German soil and occupied by the victorious allied powers, and Hitler had committed suicide.

The Holocaust
Hitler's anti-Semitism had been evident from the start. Before their rise to power, Hitler engaged in violent anti-Semitic rhetoric that had appealed to sentiments that were quite commonplace to the average German of the day. However, once Hitler and the Nazis came to power, this rhetoric gradually turned into something quite tangible and sinister. The Nazi-sponsored 'Night of the Broken Glass' (Kristallnacht) saw thousands of Jewish-owned shops destroyed by rampaging mobs of SA troops and ordinary Germans. Thousands of Jews were subsequently arrested. Many Jews that had not already fled before this fled afterwards. They were the lucky ones. Once the war had started in 1939, escape became far more difficult, and millions of those who failed to escape where deported to concentration camps where they often starved or were worked to death. Summary execution was common. In 1942, a deliberate policy of extermination was introduced, during which Jews and other disfavoured political ethnic groups were deliberately murdered en masse in gas chambers disguised as showers.
The horrors committed during the Holocaust had a profound effect on the German psyche and their perception of themselves as a nation and people ever since.
Post War
The defeat and occupation of Germany led the division of Germany amongst the victorious allied powers, as well as that of the capital itself, Berlin. It was intended that this would only be temporary, but as relations between the USSR and the western powers deteriorated, it became clear that reunification could not happen for the foreseeable future. The USSR attempted to blockade Berlin (which was surrounded by the Soviet Occupied zone) in 1947 but when this failed, the USSR created a puppet state, the German Democratic Republic (known as East Germany) in its own occupied zone. In the West, the Federal Republic of Germany was formed, with a provisional capital located in Bonn. Germany remained thus divided until 1990, when, following the fall of the Berlin Wall the previous year, Germany was officially reunited.

Germany and the EU
West Germany was a founder member of the EU's predecessor the European Coal and Steal Community, designed to share control of vital strategic resources (such as coal and steel) designed to make 'materially impossible' for the major nations of Europe to go to war against each other ever again. As Germany recovered from the war (with American aid via the Marshal Plan) she once again emerged as the industrial powerhouse of Europe. As the Coal and Steel Community evolved into the European Economic Community (EEC) and European Union (EU) Germany spearheaded the union as its leading economic and industrial power.

Coinage of Germany
Roman Coins were probably the first to be used as currency in what is now Germany. An important Roman Mint was located at Triers, which operated until the middle of the 5th Century. Charlemagne introduced a £sd based system into the territories under his control there, but as time went on, each German territory developed its own system of currency. Units of currency used in these disparate German states included hellers, pfennigs, kreuzers, schillings, thalers, gulden, krones and marks.
After German unification in 1871, Imperial Germany introduced a common currency based on 1 Mark (valued at 1/3 of an old veireinsthaler) and divided into 100 pfennigs. Coins valued at less than 1 mark were struck to a common standard. However, coins struck in precious metal (silver and gold) valued at 1 mark and above had obverses that represented the individual state or city issuing the coin. Prussian coins featured the King of Prussia, for example, whereas the City of Hamburg would feature the Hamburg Coat-of-Arms, reflecting its historic status as a free imperial city, other kingdoms and principalities typically featured their own particular reigning monarch on the obverse.
During World War I, the shortage of metals vital to the war effort, as well as inflation, led to emergency coinage, often made of iron being issued for use in circulation. This money, called kriegsgeld (war money) often featured a German soldier on one side of the coin to indicate the reason for its issuance.
During the early 1920s, hyperinflation eventually saw the issuance of coins abandoned and replaced with banknotes, which also rapidly depreciated until they were worthless. The old German Mark was replaced first by the Rentenmark, and then by the Reich mark in 1924. From 1938 until 1944, the Swastika was depicted on German coins.
Between 1945 and 1948, the allies struck small numbers of 1, 5 and 10 Reich pfennig for use in circulation, prior the introduction of the Deutschemark in 1948. East Germany introduced its own version, the ostmark (a colloquial term, as it was officially known as 'the Deutschemark') that same year. The Deutschemark was used from 1948 until 2002, when it was replaced by the Euro.
Prior to the introduction of the Euro, coins of 1, 2, 5, 10, 50 pfennig and 1, 2 and 5 Deutschmark were issued, alongside an occasional 10 DM commemorative issue.

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