5 Pfennig Festenberg; Kolonialwarenhändler

German notgeld issued by a grocery purchasing cooperative — not a municipality or bank — places this squarely in the more obscure tier of WWI-era emergency currency. When the German coin shortage hit hard after 1914, it wasn't just towns and cities that filled the gap; small trade associations and retail cooperatives printed their own scrip for use among members and their customers. The Festenberger Kolonialwarenhändler, a colonial goods merchants' cooperative in Festenberg (now Twardogóra, in present-day Poland, then part of Prussian Silesia), did exactly that.

The issuer's legal form — E.G.m.b.H., Eingetragene Genossenschaft mit beschränkter Haftpflicht — meant the cooperative carried limited liability, a detail that would have mattered to anyone wondering whether the scrip was actually redeemable.