5 Pfennig - Schlierbach Wächtersbacher Steingutfabrik G.M.B.H.

Wächtersbacher Steingutfabrik, a ceramics manufacturer in Schlierbach, issued iron notgeld tokens like this one during the acute small-change shortages of the early Weimar period — when the Reichsbank could not keep pace with demand and private firms routinely struck their own emergency coinage to pay workers and facilitate on-site transactions. Iron was the material of necessity: copper and nickel were still strategically restricted in the immediate postwar years.