50 Pfennig

Kiel's 1917 Notgeld issue came early in the municipal emergency currency wave — the Reichsbank's coin hoarding problem had become acute by mid-1917, and port cities like Kiel faced particular strain given the volume of daily small transactions tied to naval and dockyard wages. The embossed seal was the city's primary anti-counterfeiting measure, a decidedly low-tech solution that nonetheless proved adequate for notes intended to circulate only within a tightly bounded local economy.

Kiel would later become far better known for its November 1918 sailors' mutiny, which helped trigger the broader German revolution. Notes from 1917 predate that rupture entirely.