10 Pfennig

Melle's 10 Pfennig Notgeld from 1918 belongs to the first wave of municipal emergency currency issued across Germany as wartime coin shortages stripped small denominations from circulation almost entirely. The Reichsbank's inability to keep low-value coinage in public hands forced hundreds of towns — Melle among them — to authorize their own scrip, printed locally and accepted only within the issuing municipality.

F. E. Haag was a local printing house, not a security printer, which shows in the relatively simple typographic execution typical of Melle's issues. The Graeger reference M27.4a suggests multiple variants exist within this series, distinguished by minor printing differences.