50 Pfennig

Grünhain is a small Saxon town whose notgeld issues were prompted by the acute small-change famine that gripped Germany from 1916 onward — silver and copper had been systematically pulled from circulation for war production, leaving municipalities to paper over the gap themselves. The Stadtgemeinderat's authorization of this 50 Pfennig note in 1917 was an entirely local administrative decision, coordinated through the network of municipal councils that flooded Germany with emergency scrip during this period.

Wiedemannsche Druckerei AG in Saalfeld, Thuringia, handled a number of these regional notgeld commissions. The watermarked paper was a deliberate anti-counterfeiting measure — surprisingly rigorous for a municipal issue of such modest face value in a town of Grünhain's size.