50 Pfennig - Freden am Leine Glasfabrik Schildhorst

This is a German Notgeld token issued by the Glasfabrik Schildhorst, a glassworks facility in Freden an der Leine, Lower Saxony. Factory-issued emergency currency of this type proliferated during the acute coin shortages of 1917–1921, when wartime metal requisitions and postwar economic disruption left municipalities and private enterprises alike scrambling to facilitate small transactions. Zinc was the default material precisely because copper, nickel, and brass had been redirected to military production.

The Menzel catalog references place this squarely within the documented industrial Notgeld series, a subset that attracts considerably less collector attention than the more colorful municipal paper issues of the same period.