2 Pfennig - Ruhla Thiel and Schuchardt

Ruhla, a small town in the Thuringian Forest, became one of Germany's most concentrated industrial pockets in the nineteenth century — watchmaking, pipe manufacture, and metalworking firms packed into a narrow valley. Thiel & Schuchardt operated there as part of that dense industrial fabric, and like many mid-sized employers of the Wilhelmine and early Weimar periods, issued iron notgeld tokens to manage wage payments during coin shortages. Iron was the fallback material when copper and zinc were diverted to the war economy after 1914.