10 Pfennig Wurzener Bank

Wurzener Bank was a regional savings institution in Saxony, and like hundreds of German municipal banks and commercial bodies in 1917, it issued low-denomination emergency currency — Notgeld — to address the acute coin shortage caused by wartime hoarding and metal requisitioning. By mid-war, pfennig coins had effectively vanished from retail circulation across Germany, forcing local authorities and private institutions to fill the gap themselves.

The Reichsbank had no practical mechanism to supply small change at that scale, so it tolerated the proliferation. This note was printed locally in Wurzen, almost certainly by a small commercial press, which accounts for the modest production quality typical of Saxon municipal Notgeld from this period.