25 Pfennig

Gera's 1921 Notgeld issue was part of the vast municipal emergency currency wave that swept Thuringia and the rest of Germany as the Reichsbank struggled to keep small-denomination coinage in circulation during the postwar inflation spiral. The Stadtrat issued these notes as a localized stopgap — legally tolerated, practically necessary, and almost universally collected rather than spent, which is precisely why so many survive in high grade today.

The watermark is worth noting: relatively few Thuringian municipal issues at this denomination bothered with it, making the DeNG 1/2#0420.1-1/4 reference series distinguishable from the mass of plainer contemporaries.