5 Pfennig - Tönning

Tönning issued this zinc notgeld piece in 1917 under the same wartime metal shortages that forced hundreds of German municipalities to produce their own emergency coinage after Berlin monopolized copper, nickel, and brass for the war effort. The city — a small North Frisian port on the Eider estuary — had no particular minting tradition, making this piece a purely administrative response to the collapse of small-denomination circulation. Zinc was the fallback material for the poorest-resourced issuers.