5 Pfennig - Segeberg

The Vorschuss-Verein zu Segeberg was a credit cooperative — essentially a local savings and loan association — in the Holstein town of Bad Segeberg. Like hundreds of similar institutions across Germany in 1917, it stepped into the acute small-change shortage caused by wartime hoarding and metal requisitioning by issuing its own notgeld coinage in zinc, a metal the Reichsbank had not yet fully commandeered for shell casings.

Credit cooperatives issuing emergency coinage is unusual even within the broad notgeld phenomenon; most civilian issuers were municipalities or merchants' associations, not financial institutions.