5 Pfennig

Artern is a small salt-mining town in Thuringia, and like hundreds of other German municipalities in 1921, it issued its own emergency small-change notes — Kleingeldscheine — to fill the gap left by a chronic shortage of low-denomination coinage. The post-war inflation had made hoarding of metal currency widespread long before the hyperinflationary collapse of 1923 arrived.

The DeNG reference places this within a well-documented local series, and the decimal suffix (.3a) suggests multiple text or color variants were issued within the same face value run — not unusual for municipal Notgeld of this period, where print runs were small and local printers sometimes made mid-run adjustments.