Mechanische Baumwoll-Spinnerei und Weberei Kempten was one of the major textile manufacturers in the Allgäu region, and like many large German industrial firms during the First World War and its aftermath, it issued iron notgeld tokens to compensate for the catastrophic shortage of small-denomination coinage. The wartime requisitioning of copper and nickel for munitions production essentially stripped the Reichsbank of its base-metal coin supply, forcing employers to mint their own substitutes for wage and canteen transactions on the factory floor.
Iron was the default fallback material — cheap, available, but quick to corrode, which accounts for the difficulty in finding surviving examples without surface degradation.
Mechanische Baumwoll-Spinnerei und Weberei Kempten was one of the major textile manufacturers in the Allgäu region, and like many large German industrial firms during the First World War and its aftermath, it issued iron notgeld tokens to compensate for the catastrophic shortage of small-denomination coinage. The wartime requisitioning of copper and nickel for munitions production essentially stripped the Reichsbank of its base-metal coin supply, forcing employers to mint their own substitutes for wage and canteen transactions on the factory floor.
Iron was the default fallback material — cheap, available, but quick to corrode, which accounts for the difficulty in finding surviving examples without surface degradation.