3 Pfennig v. Bodelschwinghsche Anstalten Bethel

Bethel, the diaconal institution founded outside Bielefeld in 1867, operated as a largely self-contained community for people with epilepsy and other disabilities. At its peak it housed tens of thousands of residents and staff across its own farms, workshops, bakeries, and tradesmen — enough economic activity to justify an internal scrip system that functioned as a substitute currency within the institution's grounds. These Pfennig notes are products of that closed economy, not emergency money in the conventional wartime or inflationary sense.

The theological convictions of Friedrich von Bodelschwingh the Elder, and later his son, shaped Bethel's fierce institutional independence — which extended to managing its own medium of exchange rather than relying on external monetary supply.