5 Pfennig Einswarden, Frerichswerft

Frerichswerft was a shipyard on the Weser estuary, and like hundreds of German industrial employers in 1918, it issued its own small-denomination Notgeld to compensate for the catastrophic shortage of official coinage — metal had been consumed by the war effort, and the Reichsbank could not keep pace with demand for small change. These employer-issued pieces were paid out as wages and accepted back against goods or services within the issuing firm's orbit, functioning less as public currency than as a closed-loop scrip.

The shipyard context matters: Einswarden's workforce was building vessels for a navy losing the war. By November 1918, the armistice had collapsed the entire framework within which notes like this circulated.