20 Pfennig - Buchsweiler Bouxwiller (67)

Buchsweiler — the German name for what is today Bouxwiller in Alsace — issued this notgeld piece in 1917 when the wartime metal requisitions had stripped conventional coinage from circulation almost entirely. Zinc was itself a compromise material; copper and nickel had been redirected to shell casings and military hardware well before this was struck. Municipal authorities across the German Reich were effectively left to solve the small-change crisis on their own.

Alsace's status as a Reichsland — neither a proper German state nor French territory after 1871 — meant its civic administrations operated under a particular administrative hybrid that complicated even routine financial matters.