50 Pfennig - Presseck Mechan. Schuhfabrik Vorm. Müller and Heinz

Presseck is a small village in Upper Franconia, Bavaria, and the existence of a factory-issued zinc token here points directly to the acute small-change shortage that gripped Germany during and after the First World War. Private firms — particularly in rural industrial communities — regularly issued their own Notgeld tokens to pay workers when Reichsbank coinage simply wasn't available in sufficient quantities for weekly wage rounds. A mechanical shoe factory in a Franconian backwater issuing its own currency is less surprising than it sounds; the practice was widespread enough that Menzel's catalog runs to tens of thousands of such pieces.