5 Pfennig

Elberfeld was absorbed into the newly created city of Wuppertal in 1929, which gives these municipal Notgeld issues a terminal date by default — the city that issued them ceased to exist as an administrative entity less than a decade after printing. The 1920 date places this squarely in the second wave of German small-change emergency money, when coin shortages persisted well after the armistice and municipalities across the Rhineland and Westphalia were still plugging the gap with locally printed scrip.

R. L. Friderichs & Co. was a local Elberfeld printer, and the short run distances between press and issuing authority were typical of how quickly these notes could be turned around when the need arose.