5 Pfennig - Dortmund silver

Dortmund's 1917 emergency coinage was authorized as German municipal authorities scrambled to address the chronic small-change shortage caused by wartime hoarding and metal requisitions. The silver composition is the anomaly here — most Notgeld of this period was struck in iron, zinc, or pressed paper precisely because silver had been stripped from circulation. A municipality issuing .900 silver emergency pfennig in 1917 was working against the grain of Reich policy, which had already demonetized silver subsidiary coinage two years earlier.