50 Pfennig - Bad Mergentheim

Bad Mergentheim issued this iron notgeld piece in 1918 under the pressures of wartime metal shortages that had stripped Germany's circulation of copper and nickel years earlier. By this point, municipalities across the Reich were producing their own emergency coinage almost as a matter of routine, the central authorities having long since lost the ability to supply adequate small change to provincial towns.

Iron was a poor substitute — it corrodes readily, which accounts for the difficulty in finding survivors without pitting or rust encroachment along the fields.