25 Pfennig

Kamen is a small industrial town in Westphalia, and like hundreds of German municipalities in 1919, it issued its own emergency paper money — Notgeld — to address a severe shortage of small-denomination coinage that had been hoarded or melted down during and after the war. The Reichsbank provided no adequate relief, so town treasuries simply printed their own.

These municipal issues were produced in enormous variety across Germany that year, mostly by local printers with no particular security infrastructure. Kamen's issue is unremarkable as Notgeld goes — the interest lies in the sheer administrative improvisation the series represents, not in any individual note's scarcity.