10 Pfennig

Nienhagen is a small village in Mecklenburg, and like hundreds of German municipalities in 1922, it issued its own Kleingeldersatz — small-change substitute — as the inflationary spiral made official coinage disappear from circulation almost entirely. Hoarding and melting meant coins of this denomination had effectively ceased to function as currency by mid-1922.

Egon Tschirch was a Güstrow-based painter and graphic artist with a strong regional following, and his involvement in local Notgeld design was not unusual — many municipalities in Mecklenburg commissioned artists of genuine standing rather than defaulting to commercial printers' stock imagery. The DeNG reference subdivides this issue across three known variants.