20 Pfennig - Osterode

Osterode am Preußen — now Ostróda in northern Poland — issued this zinc notgeld piece in 1917 as the Imperial German war economy systematically stripped copper and nickel from civilian coinage for munitions production. District-level emergency issues like this one filled the gap left by the withdrawal of Reich small change, authorized under wartime ordinances that gave local administrations unusual latitude to strike their own circulating currency. Zinc was the compromise material: cheap, available, and deeply unpopular with the public, who found it prone to corrosion and difficult to distinguish by touch from other denominations.