5 Pfennig - Lauingen

Lauingen — a small Bavarian town on the Danube better known as the birthplace of Albertus Magnus — issued this zinc notgeld piece in 1918 as the imperial coinage system collapsed under wartime metal requisitioning. By that year, the German central authorities had stripped copper and nickel from circulation so thoroughly that hundreds of municipalities were forced to produce their own emergency token coinage. Zinc was the compromise: cheap, available, and deeply unpopular with the public due to its tendency to corrode rapidly in pocket wear.