10 Pfennig - Berching

Berching's 10 Pfennig notgeld was issued by the city treasury in 1917, the point at which Germany's wartime metal requisitions had stripped conventional coinage from everyday circulation almost entirely. Zinc was the fallback for dozens of municipalities that year — brass, copper, and nickel were absorbed by the munitions industry, leaving local authorities to improvise with whatever the Reich hadn't yet claimed. Berching, a small walled town in the Bavarian Altmühl valley with a population well under five thousand at the time, had neither the resources nor the minting infrastructure of larger cities, making its notgeld issues correspondingly small in quantity and survival rate.