5 Pfennig - Schwandorf Bayerische Braunkohlen-Industrie A.G.

Issued by the Bayerische Braunkohlen-Industrie A.G. — a Bavarian brown coal mining company based in Schwandorf — this is Kriegsgeld, emergency coinage produced when the German war economy had consumed virtually all available copper and nickel for munitions by 1917. Municipalities and private industrial firms were authorized to issue their own small-denomination token coinage to keep daily commerce functional among workers. Zinc, being less strategically critical at that moment, became the default substitute metal across hundreds of such issues.

Schwandorf's lignite deposits were actively exploited throughout the war to compensate for coal shortages caused by disrupted rail supply from the Ruhr.