100 Pfennig

Heide is the administrative center of the Dithmarschen district in Schleswig-Holstein, a region with an unusual civic history — it was one of the last peasant republics in medieval Europe, governed without a ruling nobility well into the sixteenth century. By 1921, the city was doing something far more mundane: printing its own fractional emergency currency, like hundreds of German municipalities scrambling to fill the void left by a catastrophic coin shortage. The Reichsbank had effectively stopped supplying small-denomination coinage as metal values outpaced face values.

Notgeld at this level — municipal, single-denomination, issued in the early inflationary period before hyperinflation fully took hold — was often redeemed and destroyed quickly, which accounts for the variable survival rates across the series.