50 Pfennig

Brake is a small port town on the Weser in Lower Saxony, and like hundreds of German municipalities during the First World War, its civic administration issued notgeld when the imperial coinage disappeared from circulation — hoarded by the public and consumed by the war economy. This 50 Pfennig piece comes from the Stadtmagistrat's Sparkasse branch, a savings institution pressed into emergency currency duties it was never designed for.

1917 was peak notgeld production across the German states, coinciding with severe metal shortages and the near-total breakdown of small-change availability. Most of these municipal issues were redeemed locally and destroyed, making surviving examples from minor issuers like Brake genuinely harder to source than their urban counterparts.