5 Pfennig

Stadtlengsfeld was a small market town in the Duchy of Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach, and like hundreds of similar municipalities across Germany, it resorted to issuing its own Notgeld in 1917 as metal coinage vanished from circulation — hoarded, melted, or commandeered for the war effort. The 5 Pfennig denomination was the most acutely felt shortage at street level, where small transactions had become genuinely impossible.

Municipal issues from this period were printed under no central oversight, on whatever paper stock was locally available, which accounts for the wide variation in paper quality and ink saturation seen across surviving Stadtlengsfeld examples.