5 Pfennig - Lennep

Lennep, a small textile town in the Bergisches Land east of Düsseldorf, issued this aluminium notgeld piece during the acute small-change shortage that gripped Germany in the early Weimar years. Municipal and commercial issuers across the Rhineland flooded the market with emergency coinage in 1920, partly from genuine necessity and partly because collector demand had already turned notgeld into a cottage industry. Lennep was absorbed into the newly created city of Remscheid just two years later, in 1929, making its independent civic issues a brief window.