5 Pfennig - Unna

Unna's 1917 zinc notgeld issue belongs to the first wave of German municipal emergency coinage, forced into existence by the wartime hoarding of copper and nickel that stripped small-denomination Reichscoinage from everyday transactions almost overnight. The Imperial government's priority was metal for shell casings, not pfennigs.

Zinc was the default fallback — cheap, workable, but corrosive in humid conditions, which explains why surviving examples in genuinely clean, uncorroded state are harder to locate than the catalog numbers suggest.