2 Pfennig

Vilsbiburg is a small market town in Lower Bavaria, and like hundreds of similar municipalities, it issued emergency small-change notes — Kleingeldscheine — during the acute coin shortage that followed the First World War. These hyperlocal issues were printed in tiny quantities, typically by local printers with no banknote experience, and redeemed within the issuing district. The Bezirk, a Bavarian administrative subdivision, bore direct responsibility for backing the notes, however nominally.

At 2 Pfennig, this is among the lowest denominations produced anywhere in the German Notgeld system — a figure so small it underscores just how completely fractional coinage had vanished from everyday commerce by 1920.