5 Mark

Krefeld's 1918 emergency currency belongs to the vast wave of municipal Notgeld issued across Germany as the imperial economy collapsed and small-denomination coinage vanished from circulation. The city — a center of silk and velvet weaving in the lower Rhine — produced notes through local administrative channels rather than any established banking authority, which accounts for the variable print quality seen across surviving examples of this series.

The underprint is the only security measure, a thin concession to anti-counterfeiting at a moment when the notes were expected to circulate for weeks, not years.