50 Pfennig - Hof

Hof an der Saale issued this zinc notgeld piece in 1918 as the German imperial coinage system buckled under wartime metal requisitions. Copper and nickel had been redirected to munitions production years earlier, leaving municipalities to improvise with whatever the War Ministry had not yet claimed. Zinc was the last resort — cheap, brittle, and prone to the corrosion and edge cracking that plagues surviving examples today.

The multiple Menzel reference numbers suggest at least two distinct die varieties exist for this type, a common feature of emergency municipal issues where local contracts produced inconsistent results across small production runs.