50 Pfennig - Landeshut, Schlesien

Landeshut — now Kamienna Góra in southwestern Poland — was a textile manufacturing town whose municipal government, like hundreds of others across Germany, was forced to issue its own emergency coinage in 1917 as the imperial government requisitioned copper and nickel for the war effort. Zinc was the compromise material: abundant, workable, but prone to corrosion, which explains why surviving examples in clean condition are harder to find than mintage figures alone would suggest.