25 Pfennig - Rothenburg ob der Tauber Rathaus

Rothenburg ob der Tauber issued this notgeld piece during the acute small-change famine that gripped Germany in the early 1920s, when metal hoarding and postwar economic disruption left municipalities scrambling to produce their own emergency coinage. Iron was an expedient rather than a choice — copper and nickel had been systematically redirected toward the war effort after 1914, and their supply had not recovered. Rothenburg's civic series was also frankly commercial: the town had become a destination for German cultural tourism, and notgeld sets were sold to collectors as souvenirs well beyond their nominal circulation purpose.