50 Pfennig - Sagan

Sagan's iron notgeld emerged from the acute small-change famine that gripped Germany in the immediate post-war months, when metal hoarding and the collapse of imperial monetary infrastructure left municipalities scrambling to issue their own emergency coinage. The Silesian town — later ceded to Poland in 1945 and renamed Żagań — was among hundreds of smaller German cities that turned to iron precisely because copper and nickel had been stripped for wartime production throughout 1914–1918.

Iron notgeld of this period corrodes readily, making problem-free survivors genuinely uncommon.