5 Pfennig - Kelbra a. Kyffhäuser

Kelbra issued this zinc notgeld piece in 1917 as German municipal authorities scrambled to plug the coin shortage created by wartime metal requisitioning — copper and nickel had been pulled from circulation to feed the war industry, leaving small-denomination transactions effectively paralyzed in towns too small to absorb the disruption through barter or paper. Zinc, largely useless for armaments, became the default substitute.

Kelbra am Kyffhäuser was a minor administrative center with no mint tradition whatsoever; pieces like this were typically contracted to regional printing or metalworking firms, which accounts for the variation in strike quality seen across the Funck-catalogued series.