50 Pfennig - Bnin

Bnin was a small Polish town incorporated into the German province of Posen following the partitions of Poland, and by 1917 it sat deep inside a wartime economy stripped of copper and nickel for shell casings and industrial use. Municipal notgeld of this kind was authorised by local magistrates to address the acute shortage of small-change coinage as Reichsbank metal was diverted to the war effort. Bnin's issue is among the more obscure of the Posen municipal pieces — the town had a population of only a few thousand, which kept mintage numbers correspondingly low.