3 Pfennig Tietze and Seidensticker

Penzig — now Pieńsk, in southwestern Poland — was a small Silesian textile town, and Tietze & Seidensticker was one of its industrial firms. This three-pfennig piece belongs to the Notgeld emergency money wave that swept German commercial and municipal issuers during the coin shortage of 1916–1922, when even the smallest denominations disappeared from everyday circulation almost entirely. Private firms issuing their own fractional scrip was not merely tolerated — it was quietly encouraged, since the Reichsbank had no practical means of filling the gap.

Company-issued Notgeld at this denomination is among the least documented of the series. Firm records rarely survived the postwar decades in Silesia, and the 1945 border shift complicated any archival continuity.