1 Pfennig - Iserlohn

Iserlohn's 1918 iron Pfennig is Notgeld — emergency coinage issued by municipalities across Germany as the imperial government's war economy drained copper and zinc from civilian use. Iserlohn, an industrial town in Westphalia historically tied to wire-drawing and metalworking, was among hundreds of cities forced to produce their own substitute coinage simply to keep small transactions functioning. The iron used here was itself a wartime compromise, prone to rust, which accounts for the high attrition rate among surviving examples.