50 Pfennig - Nürnberg Eisenwerk vorm. J.Tafel and Comp

Eisenwerk Nürnberg AG vorm. J. Tafel & Comp. was a significant Bavarian iron and steel works whose origins traced to the foundry established by Johann Tafel in the nineteenth century. Like many German industrial firms, it issued notgeld tokens during the acute small-change shortages of the First World War and its aftermath, when the Reichsbank could not keep pace with demand for low-denomination coinage. Brass-plated iron was a pragmatic wartime substitution, not a stylistic choice.

The Men18 catalog reference places this squarely within the documented industrial notgeld corpus, though surviving examples vary considerably in plating preservation — the iron substrate corrodes aggressively once the brass layer is breached.