5 Pfennig - Auerbach Fritz Burger

Fritz Burger's Auerbach notgeld belongs to the extraordinary flood of locally-issued emergency coinage that swept Germany between 1916 and 1921, driven by wartime metal shortages that made even small-denomination Reichsmark coins vanish from circulation as hoarded raw material. Municipal authorities, private businesses, and individual merchants were left to fill the gap themselves. Zinc was the practical choice — cheap, available, and already familiar to the military procurement machine consuming copper and nickel by the ton.

The Menzel reference numbers suggest this type was catalogued in both the 2005 and 2018 editions, indicating it has been consistently recognized rather than reclassified — a small sign of relative type stability in a field notoriously riddled with attribution disputes.