5 Pfennig - Wassermungenau Fritz Wagner

Wassermungenau is a village in Middle Franconia, Bavaria, and this piece is a classic example of the emergency coinage — Kriegsgeld or Notgeld — that flooded Germany after zinc and copper were requisitioned for the war effort beginning in 1916. Local merchants, businesses, and estates were permitted to issue their own small-denomination tokens to fill the void left by vanishing official coinage. Fritz Wagner was almost certainly a local tradesman or innkeeper; the denomination was functional, not commemorative.

Zinc was the material of necessity here, chosen precisely because it had marginal strategic value compared to copper.