25 Pfennig

Plaue is a small town on the Gera river, absorbed into Brand-Erbach in 1994, and like hundreds of similarly sized German municipalities it issued Notgeld during the inflationary chaos of the early Weimar years. This 25 Pfennig note was designed by Max Bechstein of Ilmenau, a local commercial artist whose name appears on several Thuringian Notgeld issues from this period — regional printers routinely engaged nearby illustrators rather than commissioning the larger Leipzig or Berlin houses.

The printed date of 30 April 1945 on a 1921 Notgeld issue almost certainly reflects a reprint date recorded in a later catalog or auction house notation — not the original date of issue, which predates that by roughly two decades.