5 Pfennig Federal Treasury Note

West Germany's small-denomination treasury notes — the 5 and 10 Pfennig pieces — are a genuine oddity in postwar European currency. By 1967 most industrialized nations had long abandoned paper for coins at this value level, but chronic shortages of small coinage in the Federal Republic kept these fractional notes in active use well into the late 1960s. The Bundesdruckerei produced them under strict federal contract, the same facility handling the full Deutsche Mark banknote series simultaneously.

Withdrawn and demonetized in 1975, surviving uncirculated examples are harder to find than the low face value implies — most were simply spent, lost, or discarded.