3 Mark - Frederick II Silver Wedding

Issued to mark the silver wedding anniversary of Frederick II of Anhalt and his wife Marie of Baden, this 1914 piece belongs to the final wave of German states commemorative coinage produced before the outbreak of the First World War effectively ended such issues. Within months of its striking, the silver content of German coinage became a wartime casualty, and the federal commemorative program that had allowed minor states like Anhalt-Dessau to mint their own pieces collapsed entirely under emergency monetary legislation.

Anhalt-Dessau had one of the smaller populations among the German federal states — fewer than 350,000 subjects — which consistently kept its commemorative mintages modest.