10 Pfennig

Elze is a small town in Lower Saxony, and like hundreds of similarly modest German municipalities in 1917, it was forced into issuing its own emergency small-change notes — Kleingeldscheine — because the wartime metal shortage had driven copper and nickel coins out of circulation almost entirely. The Reichsbank offered no practical solution at the local level, so towns simply printed their own.

The DeNG reference places this squarely in the first wave of municipal Notgeld before the later, more deliberately collectible issues flooded the market from 1920 onward. This is functional wartime paper, not a souvenir.