25 Pfennig

Ritterhude is a small municipality in Lower Saxony, and this 25 Pfennig note belongs to the vast wave of Kleingeldersatz — small-change substitute currency — that German towns issued between 1916 and the early 1920s when coin metal was requisitioned for the war effort and postwar shortages kept official coinage off the streets. Municipalities had no formal monetary authority; they issued these notes on local credit, essentially asking residents to trust the town over the Reich.

Casten & Suhling were a Bremen commercial printing firm, not a specialist banknote printer. That distinction matters — security features were minimal, and local Notgeld was notoriously easy to forge, though the limited geographic acceptance made counterfeiting largely pointless.