50 Pfennig - Rosenheim

Rosenheim's zinc notgeld issue belongs to the first wave of German municipal emergency coinage, triggered when wartime metal requisitions stripped copper and nickel from civilian minting almost entirely by 1916. Cities and towns were authorized to fill the gap themselves, producing locally valid small change that the Reichsbank had no capacity to supply. Zinc was the compromise material — abundant, workable, but prone to corrosion, which explains why survivors in clean condition are harder to locate than raw survival numbers suggest.