5 Pfennig

Melle is a small town in Lower Saxony, and this note is exactly what you'd expect from a minor municipal issuer in 1917 — locally printed, locally spent, and produced in direct response to the acute small-change shortage that gripped Germany as the war ground on. The Reichsbank's metal coinage had effectively vanished from circulation by mid-war, hoarded or melted, forcing hundreds of German municipalities to print their own Kleingeldersatz.

F. E. Haag was a local printer, not a specialist security firm. That matters for condition expectations — the printing quality on Melle notgeld is modest, and ink strike inconsistencies are common across the series.