5 Pfennigs - Frankfurt am Main Goldschmidt & Loewenick

Goldschmidt & Loewenick was a Frankfurt wholesale textile firm, and this zinc piece is one of thousands of privately issued Notgeld tokens that flooded German commerce in 1918 as the imperial government's metal coinage effectively vanished — hoarded, melted, or simply unproduced amid wartime material shortages. Municipalities, businesses, and even individual shops plugged the gap with their own issues, creating a circulation patchwork that the Reichsbank tolerated out of necessity rather than policy.