2 Pfennigs - Dresden Dyckerhoff & Widmann A.G.

Dyckerhoff & Widmann was one of Germany's foremost reinforced concrete engineering firms — responsible for major infrastructure projects across the Reich — and issued this token during the severe coin shortage of 1918, when the Imperial government's wartime metal requisitions had stripped copper and nickel from circulation almost entirely. Private firms, municipalities, and even individual businesses were forced to produce their own Notgeld coinage to make small change possible at all. The zinc used here was itself a compromise material, prone to corrosion, which accounts for the poor survival rate of examples in collectible condition.