50 Pfennigs - Bautzen Waggonfabrik Busch

Waggonfabrik Busch was one of Saxony's principal railway carriage manufacturers, and like hundreds of German industrial firms it issued its own emergency coinage — Werksgeld — redeemable only within company premises. These tokens functioned as a closed monetary circuit: paid out as wages or canteen credit, spent in company-controlled facilities, and theoretically impossible to drain the firm's cash reserves. The zinc composition dates this almost certainly to the early 1920s, when metal shortages and runaway inflation made conventional coinage impractical for small transactions.