5 Pfennig - Ellwangen

Ellwangen's 1918 emergency issue belongs to the vast wave of German Kleingeldersatz struck as the wartime metal requisitions drained conventional coinage from circulation. Iron was the fallback material for most municipal issuers by this point — copper and nickel had long been absorbed into the war economy. The Amtskörperschaft, a district-level administrative body rather than a city authority, was among the smaller issuing entities, which kept production runs modest and surviving examples genuinely scarce today.