50 Pfennig

Diez, a small town on the Lahn river in Nassau, issued this note as part of the Notgeld wave that swept German municipalities between 1919 and 1921. The federal government's inability to produce sufficient small-denomination coinage in the postwar years forced thousands of towns — some with populations under a few thousand — to print their own emergency fractional currency. Stadt Diez was one of hundreds of issuers in the Rhineland-Nassau region doing exactly this simultaneously.

Most municipal Notgeld of this type was redeemed and pulped within a year or two of issue, though collector demand had already begun inflating print runs by 1920.