5 Pfennig - Zilly D - Zilly

Zilly is a small village in Saxony-Anhalt, and like hundreds of German municipalities in 1917, it issued its own emergency coinage — Kriegsgeldersatz — as the Imperial war economy stripped copper and nickel from circulation for munitions production. Iron was the stopgap. Most of these hyperlocal Notgeld issues saw extremely limited distribution, often confined to a single employer's payroll or a village market, which is precisely why survivors tend to appear in either near-mint or heavily corroded condition with almost nothing in between.