50 Pfennig - Traunstein

Traunstein's 1918 zinc notgeld was a direct product of the wartime metal requisitions that stripped German municipalities of their copper and nickel coinage — both metals redirected to armaments production. By late 1918, the Imperial government had so thoroughly drained civilian coin stocks that hundreds of Bavarian towns and districts were issuing their own emergency pieces simply to keep local commerce moving. Zinc was the fallback material of last resort, universally disliked for its brittleness and susceptibility to corrosion, which accounts for the difficulty in finding surviving examples without surface degradation.