5 Pfennig - Burghausen an der Salzach

Burghausen issued notgeld coinage in 1918 as the German war economy consumed virtually all available copper and zinc for munitions, forcing municipalities to mint emergency currency in iron. Burghausen sits on the Salzach river at the Austrian border, and its local administration was among hundreds of Bavarian towns scrambling to keep small-denomination coins in circulation during the final year of the war. The iron used for these pieces corrodes readily, and genuinely uncorroded survivors are harder to find than the catalog numbers suggest.