25 Pfennig

Osterhofen's 25 Pfennig Notgeld from 1917 sits squarely in the first wave of German municipal emergency currency, issued as small-denomination coins vanished from circulation almost entirely — hoarded by civilians and consumed by wartime metal demands simultaneously. Thousands of German towns and municipalities printed their own paper substitutes during this period, most relying on local print shops rather than specialist banknote printers.

The Stadtmagistrat, the municipal administrative authority, was the issuing body — a bureaucratic necessity given that the Reichsbank offered no practical solution for the pfennig shortage at the local level.