1 Pfennig v. Bodelschwinghsche Anstalten Bethel

Bethel, the vast diaconal colony near Bielefeld founded by Friedrich von Bodelschwingh Sr. in 1867, issued its own internal currency throughout the Weimar inflation period to manage transactions within its self-contained community of epilepsy patients, staff, and workers. These notes circulated exclusively on the Bethel campus — they had no legal tender status anywhere else and were redeemable only through the institution's own cashier administration, the Hauptkassen-Verwaltung.

The 1 Pfennig denomination is the smallest in the Bethel notgeld series, which itself says something about the purchasing conditions inside the colony at this particular moment — before hyperinflation had made fractions of a mark irrelevant.