50 Pfennig - Beckum

Beckum's 1917 zinc notgeld was born of straightforward necessity: wartime metal requisitions had stripped Germany's municipal coinage supply to nothing, and cities like Beckum were authorized to fill the gap themselves. Zinc was the fallback material precisely because it had negligible strategic value compared to copper and nickel, both of which were being consumed by the war effort in enormous quantities.

The Funck and Menzel reference numbers indicate multiple die varieties exist for this type — minor differences in spacing or lettering that emerged from local production without centralized mint oversight.