50 Pfennig - Adelsheim

Adelsheim's 1918 zinc notgeld issue belongs to the first wave of German municipal emergency coinage, produced as the imperial government's wartime metal requisitions stripped copper and nickel from local circulation almost entirely. Small towns like Adelsheim — fewer than 2,000 inhabitants at the time — were left to manage their own small-change crises independently, with no standardized authorization process and minimal oversight from state authorities.

Zinc was the default fallback material: plentiful, cheap, and deeply unpopular with the public, who found it prone to oxidation and difficult to distinguish by feel.