5 Pfennig - Kösching

Kösching is a small market town in Bavaria, and like hundreds of similarly modest municipalities across Germany, it issued emergency coinage — Kriegsgeld — in 1917 as the Allied naval blockade drained the Reich of copper and nickel. Zinc, difficult to strike cleanly and prone to corrosion, was the material of last resort. Most of these hyper-local issues circulated only within the issuing community, making survival in any condition a function of pure accident rather than collector intent.