5 Pfennig - Pirmasens

Pirmasens issued notgeld in 1919 as the postwar German economy buckled under the strain of defeat, demobilization, and the near-total disappearance of small-denomination metal coinage from circulation. The city had been a center of the German shoe manufacturing industry for over a century, and its local economy — dependent on factory wages paid in small change — made the absence of pfennig coinage an immediate practical crisis rather than an abstract monetary problem.

Iron was the predictable choice: copper and nickel remained strategically restricted well into the postwar period under Allied supervision.