10 Pfennig

Jena's 1917 Kleingeldscheine were issued to address the acute small-coin shortage that had gripped Germany by mid-war, as copper and nickel were increasingly diverted to munitions production. The Reich government had authorized municipalities to print emergency fractional notes — Notgeld in the strictest sense — rather than mint the coins that raw material scarcity made impossible. Jena, then still within the grand duchy of Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach, printed locally, an arrangement that produced considerable variation in paper quality and impression consistency across the series.

By 1918 most of these notes had been withdrawn and pulped, which accounts for the attrition in surviving examples at this denomination.