5 Pfennig

Sommerfeld — today Lubsko, in southwestern Poland — was a mid-sized Silesian town whose municipal government issued this note in 1917 as part of the broader German Kleingeldersatz phenomenon: the near-total disappearance of low-denomination coinage from circulation once metal was requisitioned for the war effort. Thousands of German municipalities did the same, which makes individual town issues easy to dismiss as unremarkable. What keeps them interesting is the extreme localism — this note was essentially a municipal IOU, redeemable only within the issuing town's commerce.

The Adolf Forker press in Leipzig handled a substantial volume of Notgeld work during the war years, and the official ink stamp on this piece was the issuer's primary anti-counterfeiting measure — thin assurance for a 5 Pfennig note, but adequate given how hyperlocal the circulation was.