1 Pfennig - Düren

Düren issued this zinc Pfennig in 1917 under the Kriegsgeld emergency coinage program, which spread across hundreds of German municipalities as the Imperial government requisitioned copper and nickel for shell casings and other war materiel. The city of Düren, an industrial center in the Rhineland, was among the smaller municipalities to produce notgeld at this scale. Zinc was the default fallback — cheap, available, and deeply unpopular with the public, who found it corroded quickly in circulation and was difficult to distinguish by feel from other small denominations.