2 Pfennig - Pritzwalk Gebrüder Draeger

Pritzwalk, a small textile town in Brandenburg, hosted numerous private token issuers during the notgeld period of World War I, when imperial small change vanished from circulation almost overnight as metal hoarding intensified and the Reichsbank struggled to supply subsidiary coinage. Gebrüder Draeger — a local commercial firm — issued zinc pieces like this one to keep transactions moving at the counter level. Zinc was the last-resort metal of wartime German emergency coinage, corroding easily and rarely surviving in clean condition.