10 Pfennig - Gostyn

Gostyn (Gostyń) was a mid-sized administrative center in the Posen region, territory Prussia had held since the Second Partition of Poland in 1793. By 1917, the German war economy had stripped copper and nickel from civilian coinage entirely, forcing municipal and commercial bodies across the Reich to issue their own Notgeld in zinc, iron, and pressed paper. This piece is one of hundreds of such local emergency issues, but those from the Posen district carry the additional historical weight of being struck in a region that would be ceded to reconstituted Poland just two years later under the Treaty of Versailles.