5 Pfennig

Stadt Melle issued this note during the acute small-change shortage that followed Germany's post-WWI economic dislocation — copper and nickel coins had been hoarded or melted, and municipalities across the country were left to fill the gap with locally printed Kleingeldscheine. F. E. Haag was a local printer, not a specialist security press, which is exactly what you'd expect for a low-denomination emergency issue from a small Hannoverian town.

Melle's Notgeld series is modest in scope compared to the elaborate collector-targeted issues that flooded the market from 1921 onward. This 1920 piece predates that speculative wave.