5 Pfennig - Mühlberg a. E.

Mühlberg an der Elbe issued this iron notgeld piece in 1917, when the German war economy had stripped municipal circulation of virtually all copper and zinc coinage through requisition drives. Small towns across Prussia were left to fill the gap themselves. Mühlberg, a modest Elbe crossing town with no particular industrial weight, did exactly what hundreds of other Magistrate administrations did — authorized local emergency coinage under increasingly strained wartime finance rules.

Iron was the default substitute by mid-war, though it corrodes readily in circulation, which accounts for the difficulty in finding undamaged survivors today.