10 Pfennigs - Brand R. Lupke & Co

R. Lupke & Co. was a Hamburg-based merchant house that issued notgeld during the acute small-change shortage that gripped Germany in the early 1920s. Private trade tokens of this kind were technically illegal under imperial coinage law but tolerated — then eventually outlawed again — as the Reichsbank simply could not keep pace with demand for low-denomination coins. Zinc was the material of necessity, not preference; wartime metal requisitions had already stripped civilian minting of copper and nickel reserves.

The Hasselmann reference places this firmly within the documented Hamburg private issues, a corpus that runs to several hundred catalogued types.