Aschaffenburg's 1917 iron notgeld issue belongs to the first wave of German municipal emergency coinage, driven by the wartime hoarding of copper and nickel that had stripped small-denomination Reichscoinage from everyday circulation by mid-1916. Cities were effectively left to solve their own small-change crisis. Iron was the compromise — abundant, strategically unimportant for these quantities, but prone to corrosion, which accounts for the difficulty in finding problem-free survivors today.
Aschaffenburg's 1917 iron notgeld issue belongs to the first wave of German municipal emergency coinage, driven by the wartime hoarding of copper and nickel that had stripped small-denomination Reichscoinage from everyday circulation by mid-1916. Cities were effectively left to solve their own small-change crisis. Iron was the compromise — abundant, strategically unimportant for these quantities, but prone to corrosion, which accounts for the difficulty in finding problem-free survivors today.