5 Pfennig

Eschwege lies in the Werra valley of Hesse, and like hundreds of small German municipalities in 1920, it was forced into printing its own small-denomination scrip simply because the Reichsbank could not produce enough low-value coinage to keep local trade moving. The post-war metal shortage made even 5-Pfennig pieces impossible to circulate in adequate quantities.

P. Israel of Wanfried — a small town barely fifteen kilometers up the Werra from Eschwege — was a regional printer with no particular specialization in security printing, which is exactly the point: these Kleingeldscheine were utility objects, produced quickly and locally, not engineered against forgery.