1 Pfennig - Dachau Ottmar Opfinger Restaurateur

Dachau, before its name became synonymous with the concentration camp established there in 1933, was a well-known artists' colony and market town in Upper Bavaria. Local merchant tokens of this type — issued by individual businesses rather than municipal or state authority — filled genuine gaps in small-change circulation, particularly acute in Germany during and after the First World War. Opfinger's iron pfennig belongs to that wave of privately issued Notgeld, when iron itself was a wartime compromise material pressed into service after copper and nickel were requisitioned for the war effort.