20 Mark

Neustadt an der Orla is a small Thuringian market town, and its municipal authority had no business issuing 20 Mark notes — that denomination sits uncomfortably high for the Kleingeldersatz role that most Gemeinde-level Notgeld was intended to fill. By late 1918, with the German monetary system buckling under war finance and Reichsbank notes increasingly hoarded, even minor municipal bodies were pushed into issuing paper well above their usual remit.

The watermarked paper is worth noting — most small-town emergency issues of this period used plain stock, and the presence of a security substrate suggests either a printer with better materials on hand or a deliberate attempt to discourage forgery at a moment when trust in local paper was already thin.