1917 50 Pfennig ?

Algan is mostly correct, as it is a WWI war emergency issue coin. The reverse states Kriegsgeld, which translates to war money. The obverse STADT denotes a state or city that issued it, the literal translation is State North of Vest. What that state is, I do not know, Krause doesn't cover it, and all the sites I have are very definate on the issuing city or state for kriegsgeld.

What has my curiosity peaked is that, since the coin does not STATE the issuing entity, it could Maybe, just may be a prisoner of war camp issue, although that is very slim.

The issuer was "Stadt Hörde in Westf.", ie. the city of Hörde in Westphalia. Today Hörde is part of the city of Dortmund, in the state of North Rhine Westphalia.

Christian

Had been wondering about your previous post, as your explanation was basically right except for the city name. Maybe it helped that I don't live too far away. ;) Oh, and I just noticed that Hörde even has an English-language Wikipedia page. Click here. The CoA is the same as the one on the 50 Pf piece ...

(Edit: Sorry, even though I added "url" in brackets, the address won't become a clickable link here. So copy and paste it.)

Christian

Link fixed - Sap

Thanks carl, I appreciate the additional information!! Cool.

Sap, I could give you a hint on that point, IF you use in the states car wash tokens, like we use them here in Holland ;-)

Those machines, also parking machines, shopping cars, and much, much other "coin eating" type of machinery, automaticues etc.. can be "fooled" by using a lookalike coin to start or activate it.

For example, here in europe, where we got stuck on the Euro, a lot of folks used the Thailand 10 Bath (KM 227), or the Turkish 1 new lira (KM 1169) instead of the 2 Euro piece, same coinsize and almost looks same if you don't pay atention!

So it is easy to get yourself some bulk kilo's and look for coins that are same type/struckture as a coin or token, that you need for a sertain machine or automat.

This is nothing new by the way false coins, AND false tokens are as old as the coins and tokends itself, sometimes to cheat on other folks, other times just to keep up your gasmeter running!

(gasmeter? yes, in the years around WWII folks here had a meter in their home who counted the cubic meters of gas provided for heating and cooking, you had to buy gas meter coins, so you could "buy" so many cubic meters gas with a token. For folks who runned out of the tokends, they could choose, sitting in the cold and not cooking, or take a 2 1/2 cent piece, a saw and copy a gas token. That is the reason you sometimes find a 2 1/2 cent piece dith a > in it in the bulk.)

Christian,

believe me, I saved loads of parking money by using the Turkish and Thai coins :)

And if you look treu the bulk coinage, you find not always often nice coins and tokens, but also a lot of other stuff.

kind Regards, Carl

You actually did, in the sense that the mintage of your piece will be relatively low when compared to regular coin mintage figures. It's just that, when it comes to notgeld, there are so many different designs, denominations, cities/counties, etc. that hardly anybody would even aim at having a complete collection. So unfortunately "rare" does not translate to "precious" here. But I think it still is a great find, particularly in a car wash in the US. :)

@Carl: Tsk tsk, you cheater. ;) Ah well, guess there were, and maybe still are, machines around that use "antique" coin checking technology and (in the case of the pieces from Thailand) cannot even differentiate between magnetic and non-magnetic. Earlier this week the magazine "Der Spiegel" had a "20 years ago" link to a story about Polish 20 zloty coins, worth one third of a pfennig, that were used as 1 DM pieces in some machines here in DE. Seems that all one had to do was to manipulate the edge a little ...

Christian