10 Pfennig - Lehesten

Lehesten, a small Thuringian slate-quarrying town, issued emergency iron coinage during the Notgeld crisis of 1917–1921, when wartime metal requisitions stripped Germany's municipal economies of copper and zinc. Iron was the fallback — cheap, abundant, and deeply unpopular with the public, who found it prone to rust and difficult to distinguish by touch in low light. Lehesten's issues are catalogued under Saxe-Meiningen jurisdiction, reflecting the fragmented duchy structure that persisted administratively even after the 1918 abdication of Bernhard III.