10 Pfennig - Heddernheim Kupferwerk

Heddernheimer Kupferwerk, based in the Frankfurt suburb of Heddernheim, was one of Germany's significant non-ferrous metal producers and — critically — a manufacturer of Notgeld blanks and tokens for other issuers during the First World War period. This piece is an in-house works token, issued to facilitate wage payments or canteen transactions when small change shortages made ordinary commerce impossible. Zinc was chosen not for economy alone but because copper, the natural material for a copper works, had been requisitioned for the war effort — a pointed irony that the factory producing metal components could not spare the metal it actually worked.