5 Pfennig - Münchberg

Münchberg is a small textile-manufacturing town in Upper Franconia, and like hundreds of German municipalities in 1920, it issued its own emergency coinage — Notgeld — to compensate for the chronic shortage of small-denomination Reichsmark coins in the immediate postwar years. The national mint system, already strained by wartime demand, could not keep pace with civilian commerce. Zinc was the material of necessity: cheap, available, and already familiar from wartime coinage.

Municipal zinc Notgeld of this type saw heavy local circulation and survives today in wildly uneven condition.