10 Pfennigs - Reisholz Deutsche Carborundum Werke

Issued by the Deutsche Carborundum-Werke in Reisholz — a suburb of Düsseldorf — this is a piece of Notgeld, the emergency private coinage that proliferated across Germany during the acute metal and currency shortages of World War I and its immediate aftermath. Carborundum plants, dependent on industrial-grade abrasives for wartime manufacturing, were among the many industrial employers that issued their own scrip to pay workers when official small change disappeared from circulation entirely. Zinc was the material of necessity; copper and nickel had been requisitioned for the war effort years earlier.