10 Pfennig

Feldberg in Mecklenburg was a small market town — population well under five thousand at the time — and like hundreds of similarly sized German municipalities it resorted to printing its own Notgeld during the acute small-change shortage that gripped Germany from 1916 onward. The Reichsbank simply could not keep low-denomination coin in circulation; metal had other uses. Local councils became, by necessity, their own monetary authorities.

These small paper issues from minor Mecklenburg towns tend to survive in quantity because collectors hoarded them from the moment the Notgeld craze took hold after 1918. Circulated examples from the genuine shortage period are often harder to find than pristine collector issues printed afterward.