50 Pfennig - Eisleben Mansfeldsche Gewerkschaft

The Mansfeldsche Gewerkschaft was a copper and silver mining cooperative operating in the Mansfeld district of Saxony-Anhalt — one of the oldest continuously worked mining regions in Europe, with extraction records dating to the twelfth century. This zinc notgeld piece was issued in 1918 as the German imperial economy buckled under wartime metal requisitions, which stripped copper and nickel from circulation for munitions production. Private industrial employers were left to issue their own emergency currency to pay workers when official small change simply ceased to exist.

The Mansfeld mines had supplied the Saxon electoral treasury for centuries. By 1918 they were issuing zinc tokens to make payroll.