Mainburg issued this zinc notgeld piece in 1917 as wartime metal requisitions stripped German municipalities of copper and nickel — the standard coinage metals — leaving towns to improvise with whatever the central authorities hadn't yet claimed. Zinc was deeply unpopular for small denomination strikes: it corrodes aggressively in circulation, and surviving examples with intact surfaces are considerably less common than raw survival numbers suggest.
Mainburg issued this zinc notgeld piece in 1917 as wartime metal requisitions stripped German municipalities of copper and nickel — the standard coinage metals — leaving towns to improvise with whatever the central authorities hadn't yet claimed. Zinc was deeply unpopular for small denomination strikes: it corrodes aggressively in circulation, and surviving examples with intact surfaces are considerably less common than raw survival numbers suggest.