10 Pfennig - Salzungen

Salzungen's 1918 iron notgeld was a direct product of the German imperial government's wartime metal requisitioning — by mid-1918, copper, nickel, and zinc had been systematically stripped from civilian coinage for munitions production, forcing hundreds of municipalities to issue their own emergency pfennig pieces. The Magistrat of Salzungen, a small spa town in Saxe-Meiningen, was among the later issuers, producing this piece in the war's final desperate months. Iron was itself a poor substitute, prone to corrosion, which accounts for why high-grade survivors are genuinely scarce.