50 Pfennig

Quedlinburg's 1917 emergency currency belongs to the vast Notgeld wave that swept German municipalities after the Reich's small-denomination coins vanished into hoarding almost immediately after war broke out. The Reichsbank's failure to maintain adequate fractional coinage in circulation forced hundreds of towns to print their own stopgap paper, and Quedlinburg was among the earlier issuers — municipal paper from 1917 predates the more elaborate decorative Notgeld that collectors chased in 1920–1921.

Quedlinburg had been a Prussian administrative center since 1803, when Napoleonic reorganization dissolved the old abbey territory. The abbey's suppression and the town's absorption into Prussia are the political backdrop behind whatever civic authority signed off on this note.