5 Mark Jewish Ghetto Coinage Al-Mg

The Łódź Ghetto — renamed Litzmannstadt by the Nazi occupation — was sealed in April 1940 and became the second largest ghetto in occupied Poland. Its internal scrip currency was explicitly designed to prevent residents from accumulating any exchangeable wealth; coins and notes were issued by the Jewish Council under German orders and were redeemable only within the ghetto itself, for rations that were themselves controlled by the occupation administration. The 1943 dating places this piece late in the ghetto's existence, by which point mass deportations to Chełmno had already reduced the population from over 160,000 to roughly 80,000.

The aluminium-magnesium alloy was a wartime substitution — strategic metals were reserved for the Reich.