5 Pfennig - Camburg a. S.

Camburg an der Saale — a small town of a few thousand residents on the Thuringian Saale — issued this zinc notgeld piece in 1918 as the German imperial coinage system buckled under wartime metal requisitioning. Base metals had been stripped from circulation to feed the munitions industry, leaving municipalities to plug the gap with emergency issues of their own. Zinc was itself a compromised choice by this stage of the war, copper and nickel being essentially unavailable for civilian coinage.