10 Pfennigs - Crailsheim Wilh. Habermeier

Habermeier was a hardware and ironmongery business in Crailsheim, a small Württemberg market town. This token belongs to the vast wave of privately issued Kriegsgeld that flooded German commerce after 1915, when the imperial government's requisitioning of copper and nickel for munitions effectively gutted the small-change supply. Zinc was the fallback — cheap, workable, and strategically expendable. Thousands of firms, municipalities, and institutions issued their own pieces, most of which saw intensely local circulation and were redeemed or scrapped within a few years of the armistice.