50 Pfennig - Teterow

Teterow is a small market town in Mecklenburg, and like hundreds of German municipalities it resorted to locally issued iron Notgeld during the acute coin shortage of World War One, when the imperial government hoarded copper and nickel for military production. Iron was the compromise — cheap, available, and deeply unpopular with the public, who found it heavy, prone to rust, and easy to counterfeit with scrap.

The Funck reference places this piece within a numbered die variety, suggesting multiple issues were struck for Teterow — a detail worth cross-referencing against the Men05 and Men18 catalog revisions, which occasionally reclassify these municipal types as obverse or reverse die marriages shift between editions.