10 Pfennig

Cologne's municipal Notgeld program was one of the largest among German cities during the First World War, driven by a severe shortage of small-denomination coins after silver and then base metals were redirected to the war economy. M. Dumont Schauberg — primarily a newspaper and publishing house, still operating today as one of Germany's oldest media companies — handled much of the city's emergency printing work, a common wartime arrangement where civilian printers absorbed government contracts by necessity rather than specialization.

The 1917–1920 date range spans both wartime scarcity and the immediate postwar occupation period, when Cologne fell under British administration — an unusual circumstance for a German municipal note to remain in active local use.