10 Pfennig - Saar-Buckenheim

Sarre-Union — the French name for Saar-Buckenheim — issued this emergency piece in 1918 under the desperate material conditions of the final year of the war, when copper and nickel had long since been requisitioned for military use. Zinc was the reluctant substitute across hundreds of German municipal notgeld issues that year. The town sat in Alsace-Lorraine, then under German administration, which makes its postwar status particularly tangled: within months of this coin's issue, the entire region reverted to France under the Treaty of Versailles.