5 Pfennig - Suhl

Suhl issued iron notgeld pfennigs during the post-WWI emergency coinage period, when the collapse of the imperial monetary system and chronic small-change shortages forced hundreds of German municipalities to strike their own circulating tokens. Suhl was already an industrial center — its arms manufacturing trade dated to the sixteenth century — and the city had both the administrative infrastructure and the economic urgency to produce its own coinage quickly.

Iron was the default material by necessity, not choice; copper and nickel had been requisitioned for the war effort years earlier and remained scarce well into the early 1920s.