20 Mark

Lennep, a textile manufacturing town in the Bergisches Land east of Düsseldorf, issued this note during the final months of World War One as municipal coffers ran dry and the Reichsbank could not supply enough small-denomination currency to keep local commerce functioning. This kind of Stadtgeld — city-issued emergency paper — proliferated across Germany in 1918, but Lennep's position as a historic cloth-trading center gave its municipal authority enough commercial credibility to keep the notes in local circulation without serious resistance.

Lennep was absorbed into the newly created city of Remscheid in 1929, making its independent municipal issues a closed series by definition.