10 Pfennig - Rottenburg am Neckar

Rottenburg am Neckar issued this iron notgeld piece in 1918 as the wartime metal requisitions of the German imperial government had stripped municipal coffers of copper and nickel. Iron was the fallback — cheap, abundant, and deeply unpopular with the public, who found it rust-prone and difficult to distinguish by touch. Hundreds of German towns issued similar emergency coinage that year, but catalog survival rates vary considerably by municipality size.

Rottenburg, a small Württemberg town on the upper Neckar, had neither the minting infrastructure nor the political leverage to hold out for better materials.