50 Pfennig

Köstritz notgeld from the early 1920s inflation period, issued by the municipality when small-denomination coinage had effectively vanished from circulation. These small paper emergency issues were produced by the thousands across Thuringia, often by local printers with no particular security printing capability — authenticity rested almost entirely on the issuing authority's stamp or signature rather than any technical anti-counterfeiting measure.

Köstritz is better known today as the birthplace of Heinrich Schütz, the baroque composer, a fact local issuers occasionally leveraged in notgeld design during this period.