50 Pfennigs - Abbach Portland-Abbach A. G.

Portland-Abbach A.G. was one of dozens of German industrial firms that issued zinc notgeld tokens during the early 1920s when small-denomination coinage effectively vanished from circulation — hoarded, melted, or simply outpaced by inflation. Factory-issued pieces like this one functioned as wage supplements and canteen currency, redeemable only within the issuing company's own economy. Workers at the Abbach cement works along the Danube would have handled these daily.

Zinc was the default material precisely because it had negligible intrinsic value, discouraging hoarding. The Menzel catalog reference 179.5 places this among a well-documented but modestly collected series of Bavarian industrial notgeld.