1 Pfennig - Offenbach Collet and Engelhard A.G.

Collet & Engelhard was one of Germany's major leather goods manufacturers, based in Offenbach am Main — a city that had been the center of the German leather industry since the eighteenth century. This zinc notgeld pfennig was issued during the acute small-change shortage of the early 1920s, when private firms, municipalities, and utilities across Germany routinely struck their own subsidiary coinage simply to make payroll and conduct daily transactions. Zinc was the material of necessity: copper and nickel were still constrained by postwar metal shortages.