50 Pfennig - Schmiegel

Schmiegel — known today as Śmigiel, in what is now western Poland — was a small Prussian Kreis capital caught like hundreds of other municipalities scrambling to fill the coinage vacuum created by wartime metal hoarding. By 1917, the Imperial German government had already requisitioned copper and nickel for munitions, and silver had long since vanished from circulation. Iron was the only option left. The Magistrat issued this 50 Pfennig notgeld under purely local authority, a stopgap measure that outlasted the war it was meant to address.

The multiple Funck and Menzel reference variants suggest at least minor die or production differences among surviving examples — not unusual for municipal iron issues struck without the quality controls of a federal mint.