5 Pfennig - Neumarkt Schlesien

Neumarkt in Silesia — today Środa Śląska in Poland — issued this notgeld piece through its municipal savings bank during the acute coin shortage that followed Germany's defeat in 1918. Hoarding, wartime metal requisitions, and the collapse of normal Reichsbank distribution left hundreds of small Silesian towns effectively without small change. Iron was the obvious substitute material; copper and nickel had been stripped for armaments years earlier.

Silesian notgeld of this period was rendered obsolete by the currency reforms of the early 1920s, but the region's political uncertainty — the Silesian Uprisings and 1921 plebiscite were still ahead — meant these pieces circulated longer than comparable issues elsewhere in Germany.