R. Oldenbourg was a Munich-based printing and publishing house, and like many German businesses during the acute small-change shortages of World War I, it issued its own emergency currency — Notgeld — to pay workers and facilitate internal transactions when official low-denomination coinage had all but vanished from circulation. Zinc was the wartime compromise material, copper and nickel having been requisitioned for the arms industry by 1916.
R. Oldenbourg was a Munich-based printing and publishing house, and like many German businesses during the acute small-change shortages of World War I, it issued its own emergency currency — Notgeld — to pay workers and facilitate internal transactions when official low-denomination coinage had all but vanished from circulation. Zinc was the wartime compromise material, copper and nickel having been requisitioned for the arms industry by 1916.