50 Pfennig - Schönebeck Zündhutfabrik S.B.

Issued by a percussion cap manufacturer in Schönebeck during the acute metal shortages of 1917, this notgeld token represents the factory's need to keep workers paid in small denominations when the Reichsbank could no longer supply adequate coinage. Zinc was chosen not from preference but necessity — copper and nickel had been redirected to the war effort years earlier, and by 1917 even zinc was being rationed for munitions production.

The irony of a munitions-adjacent factory striking emergency coinage in a metal simultaneously demanded by its own industry is not incidental.