10 Pfennig - Bamberg

Bamberg's 1917 zinc notgeld issue belongs to the first wave of German municipal emergency coinage, authorized after the imperial government requisitioned copper and nickel for war production, collapsing the supply of small change almost overnight. Hundreds of German cities scrambled to fill the gap independently, producing a sprawl of local issues with no central design authority. Zinc was the compromise material — cheap, available, but prone to corrosion, which explains why surviving examples in clean condition are harder to find than the mintage numbers alone would suggest.