Görchen Zucker Fabrik was a sugar processing operation, and this zinc piece is a wartime notgeld token issued during the acute small-change shortage of 1918, when the German imperial government had diverted copper and nickel so thoroughly toward munitions that private employers — factories, farms, municipalities — began minting their own fractional currency to pay workers. Sugar beet processing facilities were among the more active issuers, reliant on large seasonal labor forces that needed to be paid in spendable denominations nobody else was supplying.
Görchen Zucker Fabrik was a sugar processing operation, and this zinc piece is a wartime notgeld token issued during the acute small-change shortage of 1918, when the German imperial government had diverted copper and nickel so thoroughly toward munitions that private employers — factories, farms, municipalities — began minting their own fractional currency to pay workers. Sugar beet processing facilities were among the more active issuers, reliant on large seasonal labor forces that needed to be paid in spendable denominations nobody else was supplying.