50 Pfennig - Werdau Sächsische Waggonfabrik

Issued by the Sächsische Waggonfabrik — a major Saxon railway carriage manufacturer — this is wartime Notgeld in its most industrial form. By 1918, the German state had so thoroughly stripped copper and nickel from circulation for munitions that private companies, municipalities, and even POW camps were authorized to issue their own emergency coinage in zinc, iron, and pressed paper. A rolling-stock factory producing its own currency is less an anomaly than a symptom of how completely the imperial war economy had fractured normal monetary supply chains.