Ingolstadt's zinc notgeld issues emerged from the acute small-change shortage that gripped Germany during and immediately after the First World War, when hoarding of metal coinage left municipalities scrambling to produce their own emergency tokens. The G.G.F. designation identifies the issuing body as the Gefangenen-Gesellschaft für Fabrikarbeit — the prisoner labor cooperative operating within the town's POW camp infrastructure, one of dozens of such semi-autonomous economic units that briefly ran parallel monetary systems within their compounds.
Zinc was the material of necessity; copper and nickel had been requisitioned for the war effort years earlier.
Ingolstadt's zinc notgeld issues emerged from the acute small-change shortage that gripped Germany during and immediately after the First World War, when hoarding of metal coinage left municipalities scrambling to produce their own emergency tokens. The G.G.F. designation identifies the issuing body as the Gefangenen-Gesellschaft für Fabrikarbeit — the prisoner labor cooperative operating within the town's POW camp infrastructure, one of dozens of such semi-autonomous economic units that briefly ran parallel monetary systems within their compounds.
Zinc was the material of necessity; copper and nickel had been requisitioned for the war effort years earlier.