10 Pfennig - Münster in Westfalen

Münster's zinc Notgeld issues of 1917 arrived at a moment when the German war economy had stripped copper and nickel from civilian coinage entirely, redirecting both metals to shell casings and military hardware. Municipal authorities across the Reich were left to source whatever base metals remained, and zinc — brittle, prone to corrosion, and deeply unpopular with the public — became the reluctant default for dozens of Westphalian towns.

Zinc strikes from this period are notoriously unforgiving of storage conditions, and surviving examples free of surface oxidation or edge cracking are considerably scarcer than raw census numbers suggest.