5 Pfennig

Benneckenstein is a small town in the Harz mountains, and like hundreds of similarly sized German municipalities in 1919, its local magistrate issued emergency small-denomination paper — Kleingeldscheine — to fill the void left by hoarded metal coinage. The postwar coin shortage was severe enough that even a five-pfennig gap in daily transactions mattered to shopkeepers and market vendors. These hyper-local issues were often printed in tiny runs by local stationers or print shops, with no particular effort at anti-counterfeiting beyond a serial number.

The DeNG catalogue reference places this within the documented Benneckenstein series, though survival rates for notes of this size and fragility are predictably low.