50 Pfennig - Solingen

Solingen's 1917 notgeld issue belongs to the first wave of German municipal emergency coinage, authorized after the imperial government requisitioned copper and nickel for war production and the Reichsbank could no longer supply adequate small change. Zinc was the compromise — cheap, available, deeply unpopular with the public for its tendency to corrode and crack under circulation stress. Many zinc notgeld pieces from this period survived precisely because recipients hoarded them out of distrust rather than spent them.