50 Pfennig - Blexen

Blexen was a small parish on the western bank of the Weser estuary, directly opposite Nordenham. Like hundreds of German municipalities in 1918, it issued its own emergency coinage — Kriegsgeld — to address the acute shortage of small change caused by wartime hoarding of copper and nickel. Zinc was the expedient substitute, cheap and available, though prone to corrosion, which explains why well-preserved examples from village-level issues like this one are considerably harder to find than their urban counterparts.