5 Cents

Curaçao's wartime coinage exists because the German occupation of the Netherlands in May 1940 severed the island's monetary supply chain entirely. The Philadelphia Mint struck these issues under emergency arrangements, one of several Caribbean and Dutch colonial series produced there when European minting became impossible. The compositional inconsistency between the two recorded alloys — standard nickel brass versus the silver-substitute alpaca — likely reflects wartime material allocation rather than a deliberate policy change.