5 Pfennig

Santomischel — known today as Szamotuły, in what is now west-central Poland — was a small Prussian market town that issued this cardboard Notgeld during the acute coin shortage that gripped Germany from around 1916 onward. Municipal authorities across the Reich were issuing emergency small-denomination pieces by the hundreds, but the cardboard format rather than printed paper places this squarely in the practical, low-budget end of that wave. The hand-stamp was the only authentication mechanism the issuing magistrate could reliably apply in-house.

The DeNG reference suffix "a" typically denotes a color or text variant within the type — worth checking against the "b" listing if one surfaces.