50 Pfennig - Wurzach

Bad Wurzach issued this emergency piece in 1918 under the Notgeld system, the wartime breakdown in metal supply having made official small change essentially unavailable across Germany. Iron was the fallback — copper and nickel had been requisitioned for the war effort years earlier, and municipalities were left to improvise with whatever the local economy could source.

Wurzach was a small Swabian market town with no mint tradition. Its Notgeld issues are documented but not abundant in surviving hoards, largely because iron corrodes readily and few examples have survived without surface degradation.