5 Pfennig

Ruhpolding is a small Bavarian resort village in the Chiemgau Alps, and its decision to issue emergency currency in 1920 places this note squarely within the Kleingeldersatz phenomenon that swept German municipalities after the First World War. Coin shortages — driven by metal hoarding, wartime requisition, and postwar economic dislocation — forced thousands of communities, however minor, to print their own fractional substitutes. Ruhpolding had neither a bank nor significant industry; it issued because it had no other choice.

Gebrüder Parcus was a well-regarded Munich commercial printer responsible for a substantial volume of Bavarian Notgeld, which accounts for the relatively clean typographic execution on pieces this small.