25 Pfennig

Waldenburg (now Wałbrzych, Poland) was a coal-mining center in Lower Silesia, and its municipal emergency money — Notgeld — was a direct response to the chronic small-change shortage that gripped Germany in the early 1920s as inflation began accelerating. The Magistrat, like hundreds of other German and Austrian local authorities, issued its own fractional notes because the Reichsbank simply could not keep low-denomination coinage in circulation fast enough.

By 1921 the Notgeld phenomenon had also become a cottage industry for collectors, and many municipalities printed artistically elaborate series specifically for that market. Whether Waldenburg's 25 Pfennig falls into the purely functional or the collector-targeted category is the real question for any serious buyer.