50 Pfennig - Burg auf Fehmarn

Burg auf Fehmarn issued this iron notgeld piece in 1917, when the German military's wartime requisitioning of copper, nickel, and brass had stripped municipal mints of any workable coinage metal. Iron was the material of last resort — cheap, abundant, and already familiar from Imperial German emergency issues — but it rusts, and survivorship among these pieces is heavily skewed toward examples that were pocketed and forgotten rather than spent repeatedly. Fehmarn itself, a small Baltic island connected to the Holstein mainland by ferry, had limited commercial circulation, which may account for the relative scarcity of worn examples today.