10 Pfennig - Marktleuthen

Marktleuthen is a small market town in the Upper Franconia district of Bavaria, and this zinc piece is a product of the acute metal shortages that forced hundreds of German municipalities to issue their own emergency coinage — Kriegsnotgeld — during the First World War. The Imperial German government had requisitioned copper and nickel for the war effort by 1916, leaving local authorities scrambling to keep small transactions functioning. Zinc was the compromise material, cheap and abundant enough to survive the shortage years, though notoriously prone to corrosion and surface degradation in circulation.