5 Pfennigs - Nürnberg Dampfbäckerei Karl Polster

Notgeld tokens of this type proliferated across German bakeries, butchers, and coal merchants during the severe zinc and copper shortages of the First World War, when the Reich requisitioned base metals for munitions and left small-denomination coinage functionally absent from daily commerce. Polster's Dampfbäckerei — a steam-powered industrial bakery, a relatively modern operation for a Nuremberg of that period — issued these tokens to maintain bread sales when making change became genuinely impractical.

Zinc was the compromise material: cheaper to obtain than brass, easier to strike than iron, but prone to corrosion and surface degradation in pocket wear.