5 Pfennig - Nürnberg A. Herbst and M. Ostertag Baugeschäft

Issued by a Nürnberg construction firm, this zinc notgeld token belongs to the wave of privately-issued emergency coinage that flooded Germany between roughly 1916 and 1922, as the imperial and later republican governments repeatedly failed to keep small-denomination metal coinage in circulation. Zinc was the material of last resort — hoarded copper and nickel had long since vanished — and private employers frequently issued their own scrip to pay workers in usable fractional amounts.

Baugeschäft tokens of this kind rarely survived in quantity; construction sites are not gentle environments for thin zinc.