50 Pfennig - Haynau Haynauer Stadtblatt

Haynau — now Chojnów in southwestern Poland — was a mid-sized Silesian textile town whose local paper, the Haynauer Stadtblatt, issued this zinc notgeld during the acute small-change shortage that gripped Germany in 1917–1918. Municipal authorities and private institutions alike were authorized to issue emergency coinage when the imperial government could not maintain sufficient copper and nickel coinage in circulation, wartime metal requisitions having stripped the standard supply chain bare. Zinc was the compromise material — cheap, available, deeply unpopular with the public.