5 Pfennigs

Ballenstedt was a small spa town in the Harz foothills, and like hundreds of German municipalities in 1920, its local Magistrat resorted to printing its own emergency money — Notgeld — to address the chronic small-denomination coin shortage that had persisted since the war. The Reichsbank simply couldn't keep up with demand for low-value coinage, and commerce ground to a halt without it.

At 50 × 35 mm, this is about as small as German municipal Notgeld gets, printed locally rather than farmed out to a Leipzig or Berlin printer. Survival rate for these tiny notes is poor — they were handled constantly, lost easily, and discarded the moment redemption became possible.