5 Øre - Christian X German Occupation

Germany's occupation of Denmark from April 1940 forced an immediate rethinking of Danish coinage. Copper and bronze were redirected toward the German war economy, and by 1941 Denmark had switched to aluminium for its minor denominations — a material with essentially no pre-war tradition in Danish coinage. The shift was not a Danish choice.

Production continued through 1945 under increasingly constrained conditions. Aluminium strikes from this occupation period are notoriously susceptible to corrosion and surface degradation, which makes genuinely clean survivors harder to find than raw mintage figures suggest.