2 Pfennigs - Köln Leonhard Tietz A.G.

Leonhard Tietz A.G. was one of Germany's major department store chains — a direct competitor to the Kaufhof and Karstadt groups — and by 1917 the pressures of wartime metal shortages had forced municipalities and private firms alike to issue their own emergency coinage, known as Notgeld. This piece is among the commercial-issue iron tokens struck when copper and zinc had been largely redirected to military production, leaving retailers to solve the small-change crisis themselves.

The Cologne branch issued several denominations under this authority. Iron examples corrode readily, and undamaged survivors are less common than the base metal suggests.