10 Pfennig - Grünberg

Grünberg — now Zielona Góra in western Poland — was a mid-sized wine-producing town in Lower Silesia when it issued this notgeld piece in 1919. Like hundreds of German municipalities that year, the city acted independently to fill a coin shortage caused by wartime metal requisitioning and postwar monetary chaos; the central government simply could not supply small-denomination coinage fast enough. Iron was the material of necessity, not choice — copper and nickel had been systematically stripped from civilian production since 1915.