5 Pfennig - Hainitz Grützner and Faltis

Hainitz — known today as Hajnice in the Czech Republic — was a small Bohemian textile manufacturing settlement, and this zinc piece is emergency money: a Notgeld token issued by the local firm Grützner & Faltis during the currency chaos that gripped Central Europe in the early 1920s. Private employers across German-speaking Bohemia issued their own low-denomination tokens when small change disappeared from circulation entirely, using them to pay wages in fractional amounts workers could spend at company-affiliated shops.

Zinc was the material of necessity, not preference — copper and nickel had been consumed by the war effort years earlier.