50 Pfennig - Freystadt Schlesien

Freystadt — now Kożuchów in western Poland — issued this iron notgeld during the acute small-change shortage that gripped Germany in the early Weimar period, when copper and nickel had been consumed by the war effort and official coinage supply collapsed at the local level. Municipal authorities across Silesia stepped in with their own emergency issues, the Magistrat here among hundreds of such bodies exercising a de facto minting function that the Reichsbank was in no position to contest. The Funck and Menzel catalogue variants (.2 suffix) indicate a secondary die or edge distinction from the primary type.