50 Pfennig

Bad Sulza was a small spa town in Thuringia whose wartime Notgeld issue followed the pattern of thousands of German municipalities scrambling to cover small-denomination shortages after silver and copper coinage disappeared from circulation. The Seidel signature almost certainly indicates a local administrative official rather than a bank officer — Stadtgemeinde issues at this level rarely had formal banking infrastructure behind them.

The April 1945 print date is the detail worth pausing on. By that point, American forces were already inside Germany and would reach Thuringia within days. Whether this represented a final bureaucratic reflex or a genuine attempt to keep local commerce functioning in the last weeks of the Third Reich is unclear, but notes with confirmed late-war print dates on WWI-era Notgeld blanks do occasionally surface.