4 Mark Herzogliche Sparkasse

The Herzoglich Braunschweigische Sparkasse issued this Notgeld during the acute small-change famine of the First World War's final year, when Reichsbank metal coinage had essentially vanished from everyday transactions. Savings banks were among the more conservative issuers of emergency paper — they had institutional credibility, fixed customer bases, and real deposit liabilities behind them, which set them apart from the purely municipal scrip flooding the market at the same time.

The embossed seal was the savings bank's primary anti-counterfeiting measure, a deliberate choice given the cardboard substrate's obvious limitations. Four marks was a meaningful denomination for 1918 — not a fractional convenience piece but a sum worth protecting from crude replication.