10 Pfennig - Ruhla Thiel and Schuchardt

Ruhla, a small town in the Thuringian Forest, was one of Germany's densest concentrations of precision metalworking industries — watchmakers, tool manufacturers, pipe producers — and Thiel & Schuchardt operated within that ecosystem. During the acute small-change shortage that followed World War I, hundreds of German municipalities and private firms issued their own iron or zinc notgeld coinage. This piece is one of them: a factory token with a defined face value, intended to circulate among workers as wage supplements or canteen currency when Reichsbank coin had effectively vanished from daily transactions.