10 Pfennig - Mülhausen im Elsass Warenhaus Dreyfus

Warenhaus A. Dreyfus was a department store in Mulhouse operating during the German occupation of Alsace, and this zinc token belongs to the vast category of privately-issued Notgeld-adjacent trade tokens that proliferated when small-denomination coinage became scarce or hoarded during WWI. Zinc was the material of necessity — copper and nickel had military priority. That the issuer bears the name Dreyfus in Alsace, a region with a substantial Jewish merchant community and its own fraught political identity between France and Germany, adds a layer of history no catalog field captures.