50 Pfennig

Vreden is a small Westphalian market town near the Dutch border, and like hundreds of German municipalities in 1917, it issued its own emergency fractional currency when wartime metal shortages made coins effectively disappear from circulation. This note was administered through the local Sparkasse — the municipal savings institution — rather than a private bank, which was the norm for Notgeld of this scale and geography.

The Grabowski and Vandor catalog numbers suggest at least two variants exist for this denomination from Vreden. The underprint is the only security measure, modest even by the standards of town-issued Notgeld from this period.