10 Pfennigs

Oldenburg in Holstein — not to be confused with the far larger city of Oldenburg in Lower Saxony — was a small market town of a few thousand inhabitants when it issued this note in 1917. The authorization came from the municipal magistrate under the broader German wartime Notgeld framework, which permitted local authorities to print low-denomination emergency currency as metal coinage disappeared almost entirely from circulation due to wartime hoarding and metal requisition drives.

Town-level 10 Pfennig notes from this period were often printed in very small runs and rarely traveled far. Many were redeemed locally and destroyed, leaving surviving examples concentrated among collectors who swept up Notgeld systematically in the early 1920s.