5 Mark

Waltershausen is a small industrial town in Thuringia, and this 5 Mark note is a piece of German municipal emergency currency — Notgeld — issued by the city council during the acute coin shortage of 1918, when hoarding and wartime metal demands had stripped small-denomination coinage from everyday commerce. Thousands of German municipalities did the same that year, but most larger cities contracted professional security printers. Whether Waltershausen did the same or used local resources is not recorded in the standard references.

The DeNG 3#538.01 designation places it within Grabowski and Mehl's exhaustive Notgeld catalog, which lists Waltershausen among the smaller Thuringian issuers with limited surviving documentation on print runs or redemption records.