50 Pfennig - Friedrichswerth Eduard Meyer

Friedrichswerth is a small village in Thuringia, and Eduard Meyer was almost certainly a local merchant or estate operator who issued this zinc notgeld piece during the acute small-change famine of 1918, when the imperial government's wartime metal requisitions had stripped copper and nickel from circulation entirely. Thousands of German municipalities, businesses, and private entities filled the void with their own emergency coinage — zinc being one of the few metals still available in quantity.

The Men22.2 catalog reference places this firmly within the private issuer notgeld series, a classification that distinguishes it from municipally authorized issues.