25 Pfennig - Oberstein

Oberstein issued this iron notgeld in 1919 as the postwar German economy buckled under Allied reparations demands and the near-total collapse of metal coinage circulation. Iron was the unsentimental choice — copper and nickel remained strategically restricted, and municipal authorities across the Rhineland were left to improvise. Oberstein, a town whose economy had long centered on the gemstone and jewelry trade centered on the Nahe River valley, managed its own small-scale monetary stopgap through civic issue rather than waiting on Weimar's chronically overextended treasury.