10 Pfennig - Mölke Gewerkschaft Consolidirte Wenceslaus Grube

Mölke, a colliery district in Silesia, was home to several coal-mining cooperatives — known as Gewerkschaften — that issued their own token currency for use in company stores, or Konsumanstalt, paying workers partly in scrip to keep wages circulating within the operation. The Consolidirte Wenceslaus Grube was one such mining association, its zinc pfennig tokens a direct product of the paternalistic wage structures common to German heavy industry before the Reich outlawed most private token systems in the 1880s. Zinc was chosen not for durability but for cheapness; these pieces circulated hard and wore fast.