50 Pfennig - Meppen Heseper Torfwerk G.M.B.H.

Issued by a peat works operation in the Emsland region, this zinc notgeld piece dates to the acute coin shortage of 1917, when the German military's demand for copper and nickel had stripped the Reichsbank's ability to supply small change. Private industrial firms, municipalities, and cooperatives were left to mint their own emergency currency — legal in function if not always in strict authority. The Heseper Torfwerk, extracting peat from the bogs west of Meppen, would have needed fractional currency to pay its workforce in an era when banks could not.