5 Pfennig - Donaueschingen

Donaueschingen issued this zinc notgeld piece in 1917 as the Imperial German war economy stripped copper and nickel from civilian coinage entirely. The town sits at the traditional source of the Danube, and the House of Fürstenberg — one of the few remaining mediatized princely families to retain meaningful local administrative influence — effectively backed these emergency issues with municipal authority rather than state sanction. Zinc was the last-resort metal, brittle and prone to corrosion, which explains the condition problems endemic to surviving examples of this type.