10 Pfennig - Suhl

Suhl's iron notgeld emerged from the post-WWI metal shortages that stripped German municipalities of any viable coinage, forcing local governments to issue their own emergency currency. Suhl itself was already a center of the German arms industry — Simson & Co. operated there — which makes the irony of an iron coin from a gunmaking town difficult to ignore. Iron was chosen for small denominations precisely because it was cheap and abundant, though it corrodes aggressively, which accounts for the rarity of clean surviving examples.