50 Pfennigs - Hauzenberg

Issued by the Darlehenskassenverein — a cooperative lending association — in Hauzenberg, a small town in Lower Bavaria near the Austrian border. Emergency coinage of this kind flooded Germany from 1916 onward as the Imperial government's wartime requisitioning of copper and nickel stripped municipal and commercial issuers of any practical alternative. Zinc, difficult to strike cleanly and prone to corrosion, was the metal of last resort.

The Funck reference places this among hundreds of catalogued Bavarian Notgeld issues, most struck in tiny quantities for purely local circulation. Few survived in decent condition — zinc degrades aggressively in humid storage.