50 Pfennig - Leutkirch

Leutkirch, a small Swabian market town in Württemberg, issued this iron notgeld piece in 1918 as the Imperial German economy buckled under wartime metal requisitions. Copper and nickel had been systematically stripped from civilian coinage since 1915, and by 1918 even zinc was becoming scarce, pushing municipalities toward iron for emergency subsidiary currency. Thousands of German towns issued similar pieces, but Leutkirch's run was modest enough that attrition has thinned the surviving population considerably.

Iron notgeld from this period corrodes aggressively in humid storage, making uncorroded examples genuinely harder to source than the original mintage figures would suggest.