5 Deutsche Mark Otto Hahn

Issued to mark the centenary of Otto Hahn's birth, this coin honors the chemist who, alongside Fritz Strassmann, first demonstrated nuclear fission in December 1938 — a discovery made in Berlin weeks before Hahn's colleague Lise Meitner, already exiled to Sweden, provided the theoretical explanation he could not. Hahn received the 1944 Nobel Prize in Chemistry alone, a decision that remains contested among historians of science.