10 Pfennig - Schmalkalden Gebr. Knauf Werkzeugfabrik

Gebr. Knauf was one of several tool manufacturers in Schmalkalden, a town in Thuringia whose metalworking trade dated back to the medieval period and remained its primary industry into the twentieth century. Factory-issued notgeld tokens like this one emerged during the acute small-change shortages of 1917–1918, when the wartime requisitioning of copper and nickel had effectively stripped Germany's subsidiary coinage from circulation. Iron was the stopgap material of necessity, not choice — it corrodes readily and strikes poorly, which is why surviving examples in clean condition are rarer than the modest original distributions might suggest.