10 Pfennigs

Kahla is a small porcelain-manufacturing town on the Saale river, and like hundreds of other German municipalities in 1920, its city council issued emergency paper money — Notgeld — to address the chronic small-denomination coin shortage that followed the First World War. These hyper-local issues were printed in enormous variety across Thuringia during 1919–1921, often by regional job printers with no specialist banknote experience.

The serial number and official stamp were the only fraud deterrents. Redemption was guaranteed only within the issuing municipality, which kept most examples local — surviving pieces in collector hands typically come from the contemporaneous collector trade that developed almost immediately around Notgeld, not from actual circulation.