10 Pfennig - Landau

Landau's 1917 zinc notgeld issue was one of hundreds of municipal emergency coinages authorized after the Imperial German government's wartime metal requisitions stripped copper and nickel from civilian circulation. Zinc was the fallback — abundant, workable, but prone to corrosion, which accounts for the frequency of pitted or oxidized survivors from this type. Landau itself, a fortified city in the Palatinate with a long French occupation history, had no particular minting tradition; these pieces were contracted out, as was nearly universal practice among smaller municipalities.