5 Pfennig - Stendal

Stendal's 1917 zinc notgeld issue belongs to the first wave of German municipal emergency coinage, produced after the Imperial government's wartime metal requisitions stripped circulation of copper and nickel. Zinc was an imperfect substitute — brittle, prone to corrosion, and difficult to strike cleanly — but it was available. The Magistrat issued these pieces under authority granted by the increasingly decentralized wartime administration, which by mid-1917 had effectively delegated small-change production to hundreds of individual municipalities.

Funck 520.1 identifies a single die variety for this type, suggesting limited production scope consistent with a small provincial town in the Altmark region.