5 Pfennig - Düsseldorf Leonhard Tietz A.G.

Leonhard Tietz A.G. was one of the great German department store chains of the early twentieth century, founded in Stralsund in 1879 and expanded into a retail empire across the Rhineland. Like many large commercial firms during the First World War and its chaotic aftermath, Tietz issued its own emergency coinage — Notgeld — to compensate for the chronic shortage of small change that plagued German commerce between roughly 1916 and the early 1920s. The Düsseldorf branch, where Tietz had a major presence, was among the locations generating such scrip for in-store transactions.

Zinc was the material of necessity: copper and nickel had been requisitioned for the war effort years earlier.