50 Pfennig - Wüstewaltersdorf Websky, Hartmann and Wiesen

Wüstewaltersdorf was a textile manufacturing village in Silesia, and Websky, Hartmann & Wiesen were among its dominant weaving firms. This piece is a notgeld token issued during the acute small-change shortage that gripped Germany in the early Weimar period, when private employers routinely paid workers in company-issued scrip redeemable at company stores — a practice that blurred the line between wages and debt.

Zinc was the material of necessity, not choice, with copper and nickel diverted to industrial and military uses well into the postwar transition.