5 Franken Ghent - WW1 German Occupation Coinage

Ghent's occupation coinage of 1917 was a direct consequence of Germany's systematic stripping of Belgian copper and nickel reserves for war production. With the National Bank of Belgium evacuated to London and official currency in acute short supply, municipal authorities across occupied Belgium were authorized — under German supervision — to issue their own emergency tokens. Ghent produced issues in multiple denominations, all in iron or iron-based alloys precisely because the metals with any pre-war monetary value had already been requisitioned.

The brass plating on iron served a functional rather than aesthetic purpose: bare iron corrodes rapidly in circulation, and degraded tokens created counting and vending problems the occupation administration had no patience to manage.