You may remember that in a previous post I mentioned in passing that during the first world war, the German Empire withdrew the low value cupro nickel coins in favour or iron coins as the metal in the cupro nickel coins was required for the war effort.

In this illustration the top two pictures show a 1908 cupro nickel 5 pfennig coin and the bottom two its 1918 iron replacement.

As you can see they are essentially the same with the imperial eagle on one side and the value on the other, although the layout of the text on the iron replacement coin is slightly different.

But it wasn’t just Germany that was short of valuable raw materials. Its ally, Austria Hungary, a primarily agricultural entity, was also short of raw materials and also replaced its low value coinage with iron substitutes.

The Austro Hungarian currency was the Krone. Like the Euro today, the banknotes were the same across the empire, but  Austrian and Hungarian halves each minted their own coins, which were the same size and weight and circulated equally in both halves of the empire, just as today in the Eurozone your change comprises of a mixture of coins from different member countries.

Just to confuse things, the subdivision of the Krone was called the heller in Austria and the filler in Hungary – this is why the Czech Koruna is still notionally composed of 100 haller – the currency still uses the Czech name of the old Austro Hungarian currency and its subdivision.

The above example is a Hungarian 20 filler from 1920, the year the treaty of the Trianon, which formally ended the war between the allied powers and Hungary.

When the Austro Hungarian empire collapsed in 1918, Hungary was plunged into chaos.

First, it became a liberal republic, and then the communists seized power to set up a socialist people’s republic, which was in turn replaced by a conservative military dominated government.

Its leader, Miklos Horthy, styled himself Regent, although there was never an intention to invite either the last Habsburg emperor Karl, or his children back.

Hungary was a country ruled by a Regent without a king.

In the middle of this chaos, there was a war with Romania over Transylvania, with the Romanian army even occupying Budapest for a few days

Romanian cavalry in Budapest (public domain)

And in this chaos, currency reform was not a high priority and the Hungarian government carried on minting small change using the Habsburg era design, simply changing the date on the dies

Just to add to the confusion the Hungarian mint was located in what is now Slovakia, which in the breakup of the empire became part of the new Czechoslovak Republic.

The Hungarians hurriedly moved the coin minting machinery to Budapest, but while they changed the date on the coins, they left the mint mark (KB) below the value on the rear of the coin the same even though the coins were now being struck in Budapest.

Old iron coins, both heller and filler, can be picked up for a Euro or two in flea markets across central Europe, or else via ebay, which is where this slightly battered example came from …