Offenbach's Mainwerke G.m.b.H. was a gas and waterworks utility serving the industrial Rhine-Main corridor, and like hundreds of German municipal and private enterprises between 1916 and 1921, it issued its own emergency coinage — Notgeld — when the imperial government's wartime metal requisitions stripped ordinary circulation of small denominations. Zinc was the default material precisely because copper, nickel, and brass had been redirected to the war effort.
Utility-issued Notgeld is among the least glamorous of the series, struck purely to make change for workers and local vendors rather than for collectors.
Offenbach's Mainwerke G.m.b.H. was a gas and waterworks utility serving the industrial Rhine-Main corridor, and like hundreds of German municipal and private enterprises between 1916 and 1921, it issued its own emergency coinage — Notgeld — when the imperial government's wartime metal requisitions stripped ordinary circulation of small denominations. Zinc was the default material precisely because copper, nickel, and brass had been redirected to the war effort.
Utility-issued Notgeld is among the least glamorous of the series, struck purely to make change for workers and local vendors rather than for collectors.