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25 Pfennig Kaufmännischer Verein

Issuer Kaufmännischer Verein, Oels (Lower Silesia)
Year 1922
Type Local banknote
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Obverse description Pink and dark green letterpress Notgeld on a pink ground framed by a gold and black decorative border, with circular guilloche rosettes occupying each corner. The central vignette bears the armorial shield of Oels — a heraldic eagle of St. Johannes rendered in black and white — flanked left and right by horizontal denomination tablets inscribed '25 Sch' in bold Gothic numerals. Scrolling ribbon banners carry the town name 'Oels in Schl.' above the shield, with the issuer legend 'Der Kaufmännische Verein:' and the facsimile signatures 'Krause' and 'Liebig' in script positioned below.
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Reverse description Printed in dark navy blue and pink on a cream ground within a gold outer frame, the reverse centres on a detailed architectural vignette of Oels Castle (Schloss Oels), its prominent clock tower rising above a Renaissance courtyard with arcaded galleries and a ribbon scroll at the base inscribed 'OELS, SCHLOSS'. Tall rectangular underprint fields in olive-green and navy stripes flank the central panel on left and right, each overlaid with a pink chevron guilloche panel bearing the numeral '25' in bold.
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Comments

Oels — now Oleśnica in southwestern Poland — was a small Silesian market town, and the Kaufmännischer Verein was its merchants' association. Like hundreds of similar trade guilds across Weimar Germany, it resorted to issuing Notgeld in 1922 as hyperinflation outpaced the Reichsbank's ability to supply usable small-denomination coinage. These notes were a practical fix, not a monetary experiment — redeemable locally, accepted by member businesses, and designed to disappear once conditions stabilized.

Grass, Barth & Comp. (W. Friedrich) in Breslau was a well-established regional printer handling considerable volume of Silesian Notgeld output during this period. The two signatures — Krause and Liebig — represent association officers whose identities are otherwise unrecorded in surviving documentation.

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