50 Pfennig

Grätz (now Grodzisk Wielkopolski) was a predominantly German administrative town in the contested Posen province, where demographic tensions between German settlers and the Polish majority had been deliberately managed — and exploited — by Berlin for decades before the war. When Reichsbank liquidity collapsed in the opening months of 1914, district committees across Posen scrambled to produce their own emergency Kleingeld, this being one of them. The Kreisausschuss had legal standing to issue such notes under Prussian municipal emergency provisions, though the practice was barely regulated.

The watermarked paper is the detail worth noting — most Notgeld of this period and scale used plain stock, making watermark security an unusual choice for a district-level issue.