10 Pfennig - Offenbach Collet and Engelhard A.G.

Collet & Engelhard was one of the major leather goods manufacturers in Offenbach am Main, a city that dominated the German leather and handbag industry throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Like many large industrial employers during the First World War, the firm issued its own notgeld coinage when official small change effectively vanished from circulation — hoarded by the public and consumed by wartime metal demands. Zinc was the material of necessity; copper and nickel had been requisitioned for the war effort well before 1917.