Nazi Germany
Nazi Germany is the common English name for Germany between 1933 and 1945, when Adolf Hitler and his Nazi Party controlled the country through a dictatorship. Under Hitler's rule, Germany was transformed into a totalitarian state that controlled nearly all aspects of life via the Gleichschaltung legal process; the official name of the state was Deutsches Reich until 1943 and Großdeutsches Reich from 1943 to 1945. Nazi Germany is known as the Third Reich, meaning "Third Realm" or "Third Empire", the first two being the Holy Roman Empire and the German Empire; the Nazi regime ended. Hitler was appointed Chancellor of Germany by the President of the Weimar Republic, Paul von Hindenburg, on 30 January 1933; the NSDAP began to eliminate all political opposition and consolidate its power. Hindenburg died on 2 August 1934 and Hitler became dictator of Germany by merging the offices and powers of the Chancellery and Presidency. A national referendum held 19 August 1934 confirmed Hitler as sole Führer of Germany.
All power was centralised in Hitler's person and his word became the highest law. The government was not a coordinated, co-operating body, but a collection of factions struggling for power and Hitler's favour. In the midst of the Great Depression, the Nazis restored economic stability and ended mass unemployment using heavy military spending and a mixed economy. Extensive public works were undertaken, including the construction of Autobahnen; the return to economic stability boosted the regime's popularity. Racism antisemitism, was a central feature of the regime; the Germanic peoples were considered by the Nazis to be the master race, the purest branch of the Aryan race. Discrimination and persecution against Jews and Romani people began in earnest after the seizure of power; the first concentration camps were established in March 1933. Jews and others deemed undesirable were imprisoned, liberals and communists were killed, imprisoned, or exiled. Christian churches and citizens that opposed Hitler's rule were oppressed, many leaders imprisoned.
Education focused on racial biology, population policy, fitness for military service. Career and educational opportunities for women were curtailed. Recreation and tourism were organised via the Strength Through Joy program, the 1936 Summer Olympics showcased Germany on the international stage. Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels made effective use of film, mass rallies, Hitler's hypnotic oratory to influence public opinion; the government controlled artistic expression, promoting specific art forms and banning or discouraging others. The Nazi regime dominated neighbours through military threats in the years leading up to war. Nazi Germany made aggressive territorial demands, threatening war if these were not met, it seized Austria and Czechoslovakia in 1938 and 1939. Germany signed a non-aggression pact with the USSR, invaded Poland on 1 September 1939, launching World War II in Europe. By early 1941, Germany controlled much of Europe. Reichskommissariats took control of conquered areas and a German administration was established in the remainder of Poland.
Germany exploited labour of both its occupied territories and its allies. In the Holocaust, millions of Jews and other peoples deemed undesirable by the state were imprisoned, murdered in Nazi concentration camps and extermination camps, or shot. While the German invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941 was successful, the Soviet resurgence and entry of the US into the war meant the Wehrmacht lost the initiative on the Eastern Front in 1943 and by late 1944 had been pushed back to the pre-1939 border. Large-scale aerial bombing of Germany escalated in 1944 and the Axis powers were driven back in Eastern and Southern Europe. After the Allied invasion of France, Germany was conquered by the Soviet Union from the east and the other Allies from the west, capitulated in May 1945. Hitler's refusal to admit defeat led to massive destruction of German infrastructure and additional war-related deaths in the closing months of the war; the victorious Allies initiated a policy of denazification and put many of the surviving Nazi leadership on trial for war crimes at the Nuremberg trials.
The official name of the state was Deutsches Reich from 1933 to 1943 and Großdeutsches Reich from 1943 to 1945, while common English terms are "Nazi Germany" and "Third Reich". The latter, adopted by Nazi propaganda as Drittes Reich, was first used in Das Dritte Reich, a 1923 book by Arthur Moeller van den Bruck; the book counted the Holy Roman Empire as the German Empire as the second. Germany was known as the Weimar Republic during the years 1919 to 1933, it was a republic with a semi-presidential system. The Weimar Republic faced numerous problems, including hyperinflation, political extremism, contentious relationships with the Allied victors of World War I, a series of failed attempts at coalition government by divided political parties. Severe setbacks to the German economy began after World War I ended because of reparations payments required under the 1919 Treaty of Versailles; the government printed money to make the payments and to repay the country's war debt, but the resulting hyperinflation led to inflated prices for consumer goods, economic chaos, food riots.
When the government defaulted on their reparations payments in January 1923, French troops occupied German industrial areas along the Ruhr and widespread civil unrest followed. The National Socialist German Workers' Party (National
Breechloader
A breechloader is a firearm in which the cartridge or shell is inserted or loaded into a chamber integral to the rear portion of a barrel. Modern mass production firearms are breech-loading, except those which are intended by design to be muzzle-loaders, in order to be legal for certain types of hunting. Early firearms, on the other hand, were entirely muzzle-loading; the main advantage of breech-loading is a reduction in reloading time – it is much quicker to load the projectile and the charge into the breech of a gun or cannon than to try to force them down a long tube when the bullet fit is tight and the tube has spiral ridges from rifling. In field artillery, the advantages were similar: the crew no longer had to force powder and shot down a long barrel with rammers, the shot could now fit the bore, without being impossible to ram home with a fouled barrel, it allows turrets and emplacements to be smaller. After breech loading became common, it became common practice to fit recoil systems onto field guns, to prevent the recoil from rolling the carriage back with every shot and ruining the aim.
This allowed for faster firing times, but is not directly related to whether the gun is breech loading or not. Now that guns were able to fire without recoiling, the crew were able to remain grouped around the gun, ready to load and put final touches on the aim, subsequent to firing the next shot; this led to the development of an armored shield fitted to the carriage of the gun, to help shield the crew from long range area or sniper fire from the new, high-velocity, long-range rifles, or machine guns. Although breech-loading firearms were developed as far back as the late 14th century in Burgundy, breech-loading became more successful with improvements in precision engineering and machining in the 19th century; the main challenge for developers of breech-loading firearms was sealing the breech. This was solved for smaller firearms by the development of the self-contained metallic cartridge. For firearms too large to use cartridges, the problem was solved by the development of the interrupted screw.
Breech-loading swivel guns were invented in the 14th century. They were a particular type of swivel gun, consisted in a small breech-loading cannon equipped with a swivel for easy rotation, which could be loaded by inserting a mug-shaped chamber filled with powder and projectiles; the breech-loading swivel gun had a high rate of fire, was effective in anti-personnel roles. Breech-loading firearms are known from the 16th century. Henry VIII possessed one, which he used as a hunting gun to shoot birds. More breech-loading firearms were made in the early 18th century. One such gun known to have belonged to Philip V of Spain, was manufactured circa 1715 in Madrid, it came with a ready-to load reusable cartridge. Patrick Ferguson, a British Army officer, developed in 1772 the Ferguson rifle, a breech-loading flintlock firearm. Two hundred of the rifles were manufactured and used in the Battle of Brandywine, during the American Revolutionary War, but shortly after they were retired and replaced with the standard Brown Bess musket.
On into the mid-19th century there were attempts in Europe at an effective breech-loader. There were concentrated attempts at improved methods of ignition. In Paris in 1808, in association with French gunsmith François Prélat, Jean Samuel Pauly created the first self-contained cartridges: the cartridges incorporated a copper base with integrated mercury fulminate primer powder, a round bullet and either brass or paper casing; the cartridge was fired with a needle. The needle-activated central-fire breech-loading gun would become a major feature of firearms thereafter; the corresponding firearm was developed by Pauly. Pauly made an improved version, protected by a patent on 29 September 1812; the Pauly cartridge was further improved by the French gunsmith Casimir Lefaucheux in 1828, by adding a pinfire primer, but Lefaucheux did not register his patent until 1835: a pinfire cartridge containing powder in a card-board shell. In 1845, another Frenchman Louis-Nicolas Flobert invented, for indoor shooting, the first rimfire metallic cartridge, constituted by a bullet fit in a percussion cap.
Derived in the 6 mm and 9 mm calibres, it is since called the Flobert cartridge but it does not contain any powder. In English-speaking countries the Flobert cartridge corresponds to.22 CB ammunitions. In 1846, yet another Frenchman, Benjamin Houllier, patented the first metallic cartridge containing powder in a metallic shell. Houllier commercialised his weapons in association with the gunsmiths Charles Robert, but the subsequent Houllier and Lefaucheux cartridges if they were the first full-metal shells, were still pinfire cartridges, like those used in the LeMat and Lefaucheux revolvers, although the LeMat evolved in a revolver using rimfire cartridges. The first centrefire cartridge was introduced in 1855 with both Berdan and Boxer priming. In 1842, the Norwegian Armed Forces adopted the breechloading caplock, the Kammerlader, one of the first instances in which a modern army adopted a breechloading rifle as its main infantry firearm; the Dreyse Zündnadelgewehr was a single-shot breech-loading rifle using a rotating bolt to seal the breech.
It was so called because of its.5-inch needle-like firi
World War II
World War II known as the Second World War, was a global war that lasted from 1939 to 1945. The vast majority of the world's countries—including all the great powers—eventually formed two opposing military alliances: the Allies and the Axis. A state of total war emerged, directly involving more than 100 million people from over 30 countries; the major participants threw their entire economic and scientific capabilities behind the war effort, blurring the distinction between civilian and military resources. World War II was the deadliest conflict in human history, marked by 50 to 85 million fatalities, most of whom were civilians in the Soviet Union and China, it included massacres, the genocide of the Holocaust, strategic bombing, premeditated death from starvation and disease, the only use of nuclear weapons in war. Japan, which aimed to dominate Asia and the Pacific, was at war with China by 1937, though neither side had declared war on the other. World War II is said to have begun on 1 September 1939, with the invasion of Poland by Germany and subsequent declarations of war on Germany by France and the United Kingdom.
From late 1939 to early 1941, in a series of campaigns and treaties, Germany conquered or controlled much of continental Europe, formed the Axis alliance with Italy and Japan. Under the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact of August 1939, Germany and the Soviet Union partitioned and annexed territories of their European neighbours, Finland and the Baltic states. Following the onset of campaigns in North Africa and East Africa, the fall of France in mid 1940, the war continued between the European Axis powers and the British Empire. War in the Balkans, the aerial Battle of Britain, the Blitz, the long Battle of the Atlantic followed. On 22 June 1941, the European Axis powers launched an invasion of the Soviet Union, opening the largest land theatre of war in history; this Eastern Front trapped most crucially the German Wehrmacht, into a war of attrition. In December 1941, Japan launched a surprise attack on the United States as well as European colonies in the Pacific. Following an immediate U. S. declaration of war against Japan, supported by one from Great Britain, the European Axis powers declared war on the U.
S. in solidarity with their Japanese ally. Rapid Japanese conquests over much of the Western Pacific ensued, perceived by many in Asia as liberation from Western dominance and resulting in the support of several armies from defeated territories; the Axis advance in the Pacific halted in 1942. Key setbacks in 1943, which included a series of German defeats on the Eastern Front, the Allied invasions of Sicily and Italy, Allied victories in the Pacific, cost the Axis its initiative and forced it into strategic retreat on all fronts. In 1944, the Western Allies invaded German-occupied France, while the Soviet Union regained its territorial losses and turned toward Germany and its allies. During 1944 and 1945 the Japanese suffered major reverses in mainland Asia in Central China, South China and Burma, while the Allies crippled the Japanese Navy and captured key Western Pacific islands; the war in Europe concluded with an invasion of Germany by the Western Allies and the Soviet Union, culminating in the capture of Berlin by Soviet troops, the suicide of Adolf Hitler and the German unconditional surrender on 8 May 1945.
Following the Potsdam Declaration by the Allies on 26 July 1945 and the refusal of Japan to surrender under its terms, the United States dropped atomic bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki on 6 and 9 August respectively. With an invasion of the Japanese archipelago imminent, the possibility of additional atomic bombings, the Soviet entry into the war against Japan and its invasion of Manchuria, Japan announced its intention to surrender on 15 August 1945, cementing total victory in Asia for the Allies. Tribunals were set up by fiat by the Allies and war crimes trials were conducted in the wake of the war both against the Germans and the Japanese. World War II changed the political social structure of the globe; the United Nations was established to foster international co-operation and prevent future conflicts. The Soviet Union and United States emerged as rival superpowers, setting the stage for the nearly half-century long Cold War. In the wake of European devastation, the influence of its great powers waned, triggering the decolonisation of Africa and Asia.
Most countries whose industries had been damaged moved towards economic expansion. Political integration in Europe, emerged as an effort to end pre-war enmities and create a common identity; the start of the war in Europe is held to be 1 September 1939, beginning with the German invasion of Poland. The dates for the beginning of war in the Pacific include the start of the Second Sino-Japanese War on 7 July 1937, or the Japanese invasion of Manchuria on 19 September 1931. Others follow the British historian A. J. P. Taylor, who held that the Sino-Japanese War and war in Europe and its colonies occurred and the two wars merged in 1941; this article uses the conventional dating. Other starting dates sometimes used for World War II include the Italian invasion of Abyssinia on 3 October 1935; the British historian Antony Beevor views the beginning of World War II as the Battles of Khalkhin Gol fought between Japan and the fo
Recoil
Recoil is the backward movement of a gun when it is discharged. In technical terms, the recoil momentum acquired by the gun balances the forward momentum of the projectile and exhaust gases, according to Newton's third law, known as conservation of momentum. In hand-held small arms, the recoil momentum is transferred to the ground through the body of the shooter. In order to bring the rearward moving gun to a halt, the momentum acquired by the gun is dissipated by a forward acting counter-recoil force applied to the gun over a period of time after the projectile exits the muzzle. To apply this counter-recoiling force, modern mounted guns may employ recoil buffering comprising springs and hydraulic recoil mechanisms, similar to shock absorbing suspension on automobiles. Early cannons used systems of ropes along with rolling or sliding friction to provide forces to slow the recoiling cannon to a stop. Recoil buffering allows the maximum counter-recoil force to be lowered so that strength limitations of the gun mount are not exceeded.
Gun chamber pressures and projectile acceleration forces are tremendous, on the order of tens of thousands of pounds per square inch and tens of thousands of times the acceleration of gravity, both necessary to launch the projectile at useful velocity during the short travel distance of the barrel. However, the same pressures acting on the base of the projectile are acting on the rear face of the gun chamber, accelerating the gun rearward during firing. Practical weight gun mounts are not strong enough to withstand the maximum forces accelerating the projectile during the short time the projectile is in the barrel only a few milliseconds. To mitigate these large recoil forces, recoil buffering mechanisms spread out the counter-recoiling force over a longer time ten to a hundred times longer than the duration of the forces accelerating the projectile; this results in the required counter-recoiling force being proportionally lower, absorbed by the gun mount. Modern cannons employ muzzle brakes effectively to redirect some of the propellant gasses rearward after projectile exit.
This provides a counter-recoiling force to the barrel, allowing the buffering system and gun mount to be more efficiently designed at lower weight. "Recoilless" guns exist where much of the high pressure gas remaining in the barrel after projectile exit is vented rearward though a nozzle at the back of the chamber, creating a large counter-recoiling force sufficient to eliminate the need for heavy recoil mitigating buffers on the mount. The same physics affecting recoil in mounted guns and cannons applies to hand-held guns. However, the shooter's body assumes the role of gun mount, must dissipate the gun's recoiling momentum over a longer period of time than the bullet travel-time in the barrel, in order not to injure the shooter. Hands and shoulders have considerable strength and elasticity for this purpose, up to certain practical limits. "perceived" recoil limits vary from shooter to shooter, depending on body size, the use of recoil padding, individual pain tolerance, the weight of the firearm, whether recoil buffering systems and muzzle brakes are employed.
For this reason, establishing recoil safety standards for small arms remains challenging, in spite of the straight-forward physics involved. A change in momentum of a mass requires a force; that force, applied to a mass, creates an acceleration, which when applied over time, changes the velocity of a mass. According to Newton's second law, the law of momentum -- changing the velocity of the mass changes its momentum, it is important to understand at this point that velocity is not speed. Velocity is the speed of a mass in a particular direction. In a technical sense, speed is a scalar, a magnitude, velocity is a vector and direction. Newton's third law, known as conservation of momentum, recognizes that changes in the motion of a mass, brought about by the application of forces and accelerations, does not occur in isolation. Furthermore, if all the masses and velocities involved are accounted for, the vector sum and direction, of the momentum of all the bodies involved does not change; this conservation of momentum is why gun recoil occurs in the opposite direction of bullet projection -- the mass times velocity of the projectile in the positive direction equals the mass times velocity of the gun in the negative direction.
In summation, the total momentum of the system equals zero just as it did before the trigger was pulled. From a practical engineering perspective, through the mathematical application of conservation of momentum, it is possible to calculate a first approximation of a gun’s recoil momentum and kinetic energy, properly design recoil buffering systems to safely dissipate that momentum and energy based on estimates of the projectile speed coming out the barrel. To confirm analytical calculations and estimates, once a prototype gun is manufactured, the projectile and gun recoil energy and momentum can be directly measured using a ballistic pendulum and ballistic chronograph. There are two conservation laws at work when a gun is fired: conservation of momentum and conservation of energy. Rec
People's Socialist Republic of Albania
Albania the People's Socialist Republic of Albania, was a Marxist-Leninist government that ruled Albania from 1946 to 1992. From 1944 to 1946, it was known as the Democratic Government of Albania and from 1946 to 1976 as the People's Republic of Albania. Throughout this period, the country had a reputation for its Stalinist style of state administration influenced by Enver Hoxha and the Party of Labour of Albania and for policies stressing national unity and self-reliance. Travel and visa restrictions made Albania one of the most difficult countries to visit or from which to travel. In 1967, it declared itself the world's first atheist state, but after the end of its communist regime in 1991, the practice of religion increased. It was the only Warsaw Pact member to formally withdraw from the alliance before 1990, an action occasioned by the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968; the first multi-party elections in Socialist Albania took place on 31 March 1991 – the Communists gained a majority in an interim government and the first parliamentary elections were held on 22 March 1992.
The People's Socialist Republic was dissolved on 28 November 1998 upon the adoption of the new Constitution of Albania. On 29 November 1944, Albania was liberated by the National Liberation Movement; the Anti-Fascist National Liberation Council, formed in May, became the country's provisional government. The government, like the LNC, was dominated by the two-year-old Communist Party of Albania, the party's first secretary, Enver Hoxha, became Albania's prime minister. King Zog I was barred from returning to Albania, though the country nominally remained a monarchy. From the start, the LNC government was an undisguised Communist regime. In the other countries in what became the Soviet bloc, the Communists were at least nominally part of coalition governments for a few years before taking complete control and establishing full-fledged Communist states. Having sidelined the nationalist Balli Kombëtar after their collaboration with the Nazis, the LNC moved to consolidate its power, liberate the country's tenants and workers, join Albania fraternally with other socialist countries.
The internal affairs minister, Koçi Xoxe, "an erstwhile pro-Yugoslavia tinsmith", presided over the trial of many non-communist politicians condemned as "enemies of the people" and "war criminals". Many were sentenced to death; those spared were imprisoned for years in work camps and jails and settled on state farms built on reclaimed marshlands. In December 1944, the provisional government adopted laws allowing the state to regulate foreign and domestic trade, commercial enterprises, the few industries the country possessed; the laws sanctioned confiscation of property belonging to political exiles and "enemies of the people." The state expropriated all German- and Italian-owned property, nationalized transportation enterprises, canceled all concessions granted by previous Albanian governments to foreign companies. In August 1945, the provisional government adopted the first sweeping agricultural reforms in Albania's history; the country's 100 largest landowners, who controlled close to a third of Albania's arable land, had frustrated all agricultural reform proposals before the war.
The communists' reforms were aimed at squeezing large landowners out of business, winning peasant support, increasing farm output to avert famine. The government annulled outstanding agricultural debts, granted peasants access to inexpensive water for irrigation, nationalized forest and pastureland. Under the Agrarian Reform Law, which redistributed about half of Albania's arable land, the government confiscated property belonging to absentee landlords and people not dependent on agriculture for a living; the few peasants with agricultural machinery were permitted to keep up to 40 hectares of land. Landholdings of religious institutions and peasants without agricultural machinery were limited to 20 hectares. Landless peasants and peasants with tiny landholdings were given up to 5 hectares, although they had to pay nominal compensation. In December 1945, Albanians elected a new People's Assembly, but voters were presented with a single list from the Communist-dominated Democratic Front. Official ballot tallies showed that 92% of the electorate voted and that 93% of the voters chose the Democratic Front ticket.
The assembly convened in January 1946. Its first act was to formally abolish the monarchy and to declare Albania a "people's republic." However, as mentioned above, the country had been under out-and-out Communist rule for just over two years. After months of angry debate, the assembly adopted a constitution that mirrored the Yugoslav and Soviet constitutions. A couple of months the assembly members chose a new government, emblematic of Hoxha's continuing consolidation of power: Hoxha became prime minister, foreign minister, defense minister, the army's commander in chief. Xoxe remained the party's organizational secretary. In late 1945 and early 1946, Xoxe and other party hard-liners purged moderates who had pressed for close contacts with the West, a modicum of political pluralism, a delay in the introduction of strict communist economic measures until Albania's economy had more time to develop. Hoxha remained in control despite the fact that he had once advocated restoring relations with Italy and allowing Albanians to study in Italy.
The government took major steps to introduce a
Reichsmark
The Reichsmark was the currency in Germany from 1924 until 20 June 1948 in West Germany, where it was replaced with the Deutsche Mark, until 23 June in East Germany when it was replaced by the East German mark. The Reichsmark was subdivided into 100 Reichspfennig; the Mark is an ancient Germanic weight measure, traditionally a half pound used for several coins. The Reichsmark was introduced in 1924 as a permanent replacement for the Papiermark; this was necessary due to the 1920s German inflation which had reached its peak in 1923. The exchange rate between the old Papiermark and the Reichsmark was 1 ℛℳ = 1012 Papiermark. To stabilize the economy and to smooth the transition, the Papiermark was not directly replaced by the Reichsmark, but by the Rentenmark, an interim currency backed by the Deutsche Rentenbank, owning industrial and agricultural real estate assets; the Reichsmark was put on the gold standard at the rate used by the Goldmark, with the U. S. dollar worth 4.2 ℛℳ. A number of companies were created with inadequate capital for their operations and authorized to issue bonds exchangeable at a 1:1 rate for Reichsmarks and sold at a discount.
The Reichsbank rediscounted the bills of these companies creating a monetary expansion without formally renouncing the link to gold. Deutsche Gesellschaft für öffentliche Arbeiten AG, founded 1 August 1930, ended up issuing 1.26 billion Reichsmarks of Öffa bills to finance public construction. It formed the baseline model for further fraudulent issues of bills. MEFO was a dummy company, formed with small amounts of capital, used to finance German rearmament off the books, it issued bills without backing by its own resources but which were guaranteed redeemable at 1:1 for Reichsmarks for five years by the government. The MEFO bills amounts were considered a state secret and were an important element in the impression that Hitlerian economics was a success; this company created a large amount of Reichsmarks off the books, inflating the currency in secret. Payment was about to come due giving Hitler the option of shifting the German economy to export goods to pay the bills or going to war and paying the debts off from looting profits extracted from conquered states.
With the unification of Germany and Austria in 1938, the Reichsmark replaced the Schilling in Austria. During the Second World War, Germany established fixed exchange rates between the Reichsmark and the currencies of the occupied and allied countries set so as to give the Germans economic benefits; the rates were as follows: After the Second World War, the Reichsmark continued to circulate in Germany, but with new banknotes printed in the US and in the Soviet Zone, as well as with coins. In practice, massive inflation dating back to the latter stages of the war had rendered the Reichsmark nearly worthless. For all intents and purposes, it was supplanted by a barter economy; the Reichsmark was replaced in June 1948 by the Deutsche Mark in the Trizone and in the same year by the East German Mark in East Germany. The 1948 currency reform under the direction of Ludwig Erhard is considered the beginning of the West German economic recovery. Three days the new currency replaced the Reichsmark in the three Western sectors of Berlin.
In November 1945, the Reichsmark was superseded by the Allied Military Schilling in Austria. In 1947 a local currency was introduced in the Saar. In 1924, coins were introduced in denominations of 1, 2, 5, 10, 50 Reichspfennig, 1 and 3 mark; the 1 and 2 Reichspfennig were struck in bronze, depicting a wheat sheaf. And the 5, 10, 50 Reichspfennig were struck in aluminium-bronze and depicted wheat stocks crossed into a stylized pattern; the two highest denominations were depicted the German eagle standard. In 1925.500 fine silver 1 and 2 Reichsmark coins were introduced for circulation, along with the first of many commemorative 3 and 5 Reichsmark coins. In 1927, nickel 50 Reichspfennig coins were introduced along with regular-type 5 Reichsmark coins, followed by the 3 Reichsmark coin in 1931. Nazi Germany had a number of mints; each mint location had its own identifiable letter. It is therefore possible to identify which mint produced what coin by noting the mint mark on the coin. Not all mints were authorized to produce coins every year.
The mints were only authorized to produce a set number of coins with some mints allocated a greater production than others. Some of the coins with particular mint marks are therefore scarcer than others. With the silver 2 and 5 Reichsmark coins, the mint mark is found under the date on the left side of the coin. On the smaller denomination Reichspfennig coins, the mint mark is found on the bottom center of the coin. A = Berlin B = Wien D = München E = Muldenhütten F = Stuttgart G = Karlsruhe J = Hamburg Four Reichspfennig coins were issued in 1932 as part of a failed attempt by the Reichskanzler Heinrich Brüning to reduce price
