10 Pfennig - Greiffenberg

Greiffenberg issued this notgeld piece in 1919 as the postwar economic collapse drained Germany's small-denomination coinage from circulation entirely. Hoarders and the wartime metal drives had gutted the Reichsbank's ability to supply subsidiary currency to small municipalities, forcing hundreds of Silesian towns to contract local foundries for iron emergency pieces. Greiffenberg — a modest textile center in the Riesengebirge foothills — was one of scores of Silesian communities doing exactly this simultaneously.

Iron notgeld from 1919 survives in wildly varying condition depending on storage history; the alloy rusts aggressively, and uncorroded examples are genuinely harder to find than the mintage figures suggest.