Unna's 1917 zinc notgeld issue belongs to the first wave of German municipal emergency coinage, forced into existence by the wartime hoarding of copper and nickel that stripped small-denomination Reichscoinage from everyday transactions almost overnight. The Imperial government's priority was metal for shell casings, not pfennigs.
Zinc was the default fallback — cheap, workable, but corrosive in humid conditions, which explains why surviving examples in genuinely clean, uncorroded state are harder to locate than the catalog numbers suggest.
Unna's 1917 zinc notgeld issue belongs to the first wave of German municipal emergency coinage, forced into existence by the wartime hoarding of copper and nickel that stripped small-denomination Reichscoinage from everyday transactions almost overnight. The Imperial government's priority was metal for shell casings, not pfennigs.
Zinc was the default fallback — cheap, workable, but corrosive in humid conditions, which explains why surviving examples in genuinely clean, uncorroded state are harder to locate than the catalog numbers suggest.