50 Pfennig - Hersfeld

Hersfeld's 1919 zinc notgeld issue belongs to the first wave of municipal emergency coinage that flooded Germany following the armistice, when the Imperial mint system had collapsed and local governments scrambled to fill a vacuum left by hoarded silver and copper. Zinc was the material of necessity — abundant, cheap, and already familiar to wartime production facilities.

The Funck reference places this among the more systematically documented Hessian issues, though zinc pieces from this period are notoriously susceptible to corrosion, making problem-free survivors genuinely harder to source than mintage figures alone would suggest.