5 Pfennig - Lessen

Lessen was a small agrarian village in the Posen region — territory that passed to Poland after 1918 as Leszno Górne — and its Vorschuss-Verein, a cooperative credit association, issued this notgeld piece when the wartime metal shortage stripped Germany's small towns of virtually all circulating coinage. Zinc was the fallback material for dozens of such municipal and institutional issues in 1917, most surviving in better condition simply because they circulated within a single village economy for a matter of months before the issuer itself ceased to exist as part of the German Reich.