5 Pfennigs

Freiberg's notgeld issues of 1918 came out of the same wartime coin shortage that forced hundreds of German municipalities to print their own small-denomination emergency currency that year. The Reichsbank had effectively stopped producing low-value coinage as base metals were diverted to the war effort, leaving local authorities to fill the gap through whatever printing resources they had on hand — in Freiberg's case, almost certainly a local commercial printer rather than a specialist banknote firm.

The Erzgebirge mining town had been issuing its own currency in one form or another since the medieval silver boom. This particular scrap of wartime paper sits at the opposite end of that history.