50 Pfennig - Gleiwitz Drahtwerke

Gleiwitz (now Gliwice, Poland) was one of Upper Silesia's principal industrial centers, and the Drahtwerke there — a wire manufacturing operation — issued this token during the acute small-change shortage that gripped Germany in the early 1920s, when hyperinflation had made official coinage economically worthless almost as fast as it could be struck. Firms across the region produced their own notgeld in metal simply to pay workers and make change on factory grounds.

Zinc was the practical choice: cheap, available, and easy to die-strike without the equipment demands of harder alloys. The Upper Silesian plebiscite of March 1921 and the subsequent partition in 1922 disrupted industrial operations throughout the region, making the window for issues like this one narrow.