10 Pfennig

Annaberg issued this note — along with dozens of other small-denomination Notgeld pieces — during the acute coin shortage that gripped Germany in the immediate aftermath of the First World War. Municipal and private issuers across Saxony flooded the market in 1919, and the Stadt Annaberg series was among the more modest local efforts: functional scrip rather than the decorative collector-targeted Notgeld that would dominate the early 1920s.

Annaberg itself had been a significant silver-mining town since the late fifteenth century, which gives a certain irony to its citizens relying on paper fragments to make change.