20 Pfennig - Offenbach Karl Ruland

Karl Ruland was a tobacco and colonial goods merchant in Offenbach am Main who issued notgeld during the acute small-change shortage that gripped Germany in 1917–18, as wartime metal requisitions stripped copper and nickel from circulation. Zinc was the fallback material for emergency municipal and commercial issuers alike — cheap, available, and deeply unglamorous. Offenbach, sitting just southeast of Frankfurt, produced a notable concentration of private merchant notgeld, reflecting how thoroughly the Reichsbank had lost its grip on everyday retail transactions by mid-war.