Sonthofen issued this iron notgeld piece in 1917, when the Imperial German wartime metals requisition program had stripped conventional coinage from circulation almost entirely. Small Bavarian market towns like Sonthofen were left to plug the gap with locally authorized emergency issues, iron being one of the few metals the military hadn't yet claimed in full. The Funck reference places this squarely within the documented corpus of Bavarian municipal notgeld, though Sonthofen's issues are not among the more commonly encountered examples from the region.
Sonthofen issued this iron notgeld piece in 1917, when the Imperial German wartime metals requisition program had stripped conventional coinage from circulation almost entirely. Small Bavarian market towns like Sonthofen were left to plug the gap with locally authorized emergency issues, iron being one of the few metals the military hadn't yet claimed in full. The Funck reference places this squarely within the documented corpus of Bavarian municipal notgeld, though Sonthofen's issues are not among the more commonly encountered examples from the region.