Weißenstadt is a small Bavarian town in the Fichtelgebirge, and this zinc piece belongs to the vast wave of German municipal emergency coinage — Kriegsgeld and later Notgeld — produced when the imperial government's wartime metal requisitions stripped local circulation of copper and nickel. Municipalities were authorized to issue their own small-denomination substitutes, and hundreds did. Zinc was the practical fallback: abundant, easy to strike, but prone to corrosion, which accounts for the survival challenges with these issues.
The Funck and Menzel references place this firmly within the catalogued Notgeld corpus, but localized Bavarian issues from towns of this size often saw limited striking runs tied directly to market-day or municipal payroll needs.
Weißenstadt is a small Bavarian town in the Fichtelgebirge, and this zinc piece belongs to the vast wave of German municipal emergency coinage — Kriegsgeld and later Notgeld — produced when the imperial government's wartime metal requisitions stripped local circulation of copper and nickel. Municipalities were authorized to issue their own small-denomination substitutes, and hundreds did. Zinc was the practical fallback: abundant, easy to strike, but prone to corrosion, which accounts for the survival challenges with these issues.
The Funck and Menzel references place this firmly within the catalogued Notgeld corpus, but localized Bavarian issues from towns of this size often saw limited striking runs tied directly to market-day or municipal payroll needs.