50 Pfennig - Laufen

Laufen issued this iron notgeld piece in 1919 as the postwar economic collapse severed the normal supply of small change across Bavaria. The district, sitting on the Salzach river at the Austrian border, was economically marginal even in peacetime — the iron composition reflects not just the shortage of copper and nickel after four years of war, but the near-total breakdown of municipal credit that forced hundreds of German localities to produce their own emergency coinage that year.