Gummersbach's 1919 zinc notgeld issue belongs to the flood of emergency municipal coinage that swept Germany in the months following the armistice, when the Reichsbank's metal coinage had all but vanished from circulation and local governments were left to improvise. Zinc was the compromise material of the era — cheap, available, and deeply unpopular with the public, who correctly suspected it would corrode in short order.
The Funck reference places this among the documented Westphalian issues, a region that produced an unusually dense concentration of notgeld types given its industrial base and high transactional demand.
Gummersbach's 1919 zinc notgeld issue belongs to the flood of emergency municipal coinage that swept Germany in the months following the armistice, when the Reichsbank's metal coinage had all but vanished from circulation and local governments were left to improvise. Zinc was the compromise material of the era — cheap, available, and deeply unpopular with the public, who correctly suspected it would corrode in short order.
The Funck reference places this among the documented Westphalian issues, a region that produced an unusually dense concentration of notgeld types given its industrial base and high transactional demand.