5 Mark Birth of Wilhelm C. Röntgen

This commemorative was issued by East Germany to mark the 125th anniversary of Wilhelm Röntgen's birth — an ideologically convenient choice, since the GDR frequently claimed scientific luminaries of German history as socialist cultural property regardless of their actual political associations. Röntgen himself was thoroughly apolitical, spent most of his career in Bavaria, and died in 1923 in Munich, impoverished partly because he had refused to patent his X-ray discovery on principle.

The Berlin mint produced this in the same copper-nickel series that defined DDR commemorative coinage throughout the 1970s.