5 Pfennig - Langenschwalbach

Langenschwalbach — now Bad Schwalbach in Hesse — issued this iron notgeld pfennig in 1917 as wartime metal requisitions stripped municipal coffers of copper and nickel. By mid-war, the imperial government had systematically claimed base metal coinage for munitions production, forcing hundreds of small German towns to commission their own emergency issues. Iron was the default fallback, though it corrodes readily, which explains why undamaged survivors are harder to find than their original mintages suggest.