5 Pfennig - Ratibor

Ratibor's 1918 iron notgeld belongs to the massive wave of municipal emergency coinage that flooded Germany during the final year of the First World War, when copper and nickel had been systematically diverted to war production for years. The city — now Racibórz in southwestern Poland — was an industrial center in Upper Silesia, a region that would itself become a flashpoint within three years, fought over in the 1921 plebiscite and subsequent armed uprisings before being partitioned between Germany and Poland.

Iron was a poor substitute: it corroded quickly in circulation, which accounts for the difficulty in finding clean survivors today.