10 Pfennig - Donaueschingen

Donaueschingen sits at the confluence of the Brigach and Breg rivers — the traditional source of the Danube — and was the seat of the Princes of Fürstenberg, whose family essentially ran the town's civic administration well into the twentieth century. This 1917 zinc notgeld issue belongs to the wave of emergency municipal coinage that swept German cities when wartime metal requisitions stripped copper and nickel from the civilian economy. Zinc was allocated reluctantly; it too had military applications, which is why many of these pieces were struck thin and in relatively small runs.