5 Pfennig Gemeinde-Sparkasse

Bergen an der Dumme is a small market town in Lower Saxony, and in 1922 it was doing what hundreds of similarly obscure German municipalities were forced to do: printing its own emergency money. The hyperinflationary spiral had made small Reichsmark coin hoarding endemic, and the resulting shortage of fractional currency pushed local savings banks and municipal bodies to fill the gap with Notgeld. Gebrüder Jänecke in Hannover handled an enormous volume of this work for Lower Saxon issuers during the period.

The Gemeinde-Sparkasse designation identifies this as the municipal savings bank rather than a private or regional bank.