1 Pfennig - Oberhausen PoW Camp Sterkrade Colliery

Zeche Sterkrade was one of several Ruhr coal operations that used prisoner of war labor during World War I, issuing fractional camp currency to manage small transactions within the compound without putting Reichsmarks into circulation among prisoners. These colliery-issued pfennig notes occupy an awkward taxonomic space — part notgeld, part scrip, not quite either — and are routinely undercounted in general German emergency money surveys.

The Sterkrade pieces at the pfennig level are among the more elusive of the Oberhausen camp issues, partly because such low denominations were used hard and discarded.