25 Pfennig - Peine

Peine's 1918 iron notgeld issue was a direct consequence of wartime metal requisitioning that had stripped German municipalities of copper and nickel reserves. By mid-1918, the imperial government had been pulling subsidiary coinage metals for munitions production for years, leaving local administrations to improvise with whatever the war economy hadn't yet claimed. Iron was the answer for dozens of small cities — cheap, available, and deeply unpopular with the public who found it heavy, prone to rust, and visually bleak against the brass and nickel pieces it replaced.