25 Pfennig

Ballenstedt sits at the edge of the Harz Mountains in Anhalt, a small court town that had served as the seat of the Ascanians before the House of Anhalt consolidated elsewhere. By 1921 it was producing Notgeld like hundreds of other German municipalities — not because of local economic catastrophe, but because the Reichsbank simply could not supply small-denomination coinage fast enough to keep retail trade moving during the postwar inflationary spiral.

Louis Koch in Halberstadt was a regional printer who handled multiple municipal Notgeld commissions across the area, which accounts for the family resemblance between several Harz-region issues of this period. The DeNG reference suffix range .3-9/24 indicates this belongs to a dated subseries, with the final digit denoting the specific typeset variant within the broader Ballenstedt 25 Pfennig group.