50 Pfennig - Saar-Buckenheim

Sarre-Union issued this piece in 1917 under the pressures of wartime metal requisitioning, which had stripped copper and nickel from civilian coinage entirely. Zinc was the reluctant substitute across hundreds of German municipal Notgeld issues that year. This Alsatian town — administratively caught between French cultural identity and German imperial governance — produced emergency coinage that outlasted the political order that authorized it, with the armistice arriving before the pieces wore out.