5 Pfennig - Saalfeld an der Saale

Saalfeld's 1918 iron notgeld issue belongs to the first wave of municipal emergency coinage that swept German cities as wartime metal requisitions stripped the Reichsbank's ability to supply small change. Iron was the default fallback — copper and nickel had been diverted to shell casings and military hardware years earlier. Dozens of Thuringian municipalities struck their own pieces that year under similar pressures, each with local authorization rather than central coordination.

The Funck 459.1A designation places this among the earlier-catalogued varieties of the Saalfeld issues.