25 Pfennig

Wesel's 1918 Kleingeldscheine were a direct response to the hoarding of metal coinage that gripped German municipalities from the first years of the war. By 1918 the Reichsbank had long since lost control of small change circulation, and hundreds of German cities — Wesel among them — were legally authorized to fill the gap with locally printed Notgeld. The practical result was an enormous typological mess, with towns issuing notes on wildly varying paper stocks and through whatever printer was available.

Wesel, a Rhine crossing town with a long Prussian garrison history, issued conservatively relative to some Rhenish neighbors. The 25 Pfennig denomination was the workhorse of municipal Notgeld, intended for bread, tram fares, and market transactions.