50 Pfennig

Rauenstein is a small village in the Sonneberg district, and like hundreds of Thuringian municipalities it resorted to locally issued Notgeld during the inflationary pressures of 1920. These small-denomination emergency notes were a practical response to the acute coin shortage of the period, with municipal authorities effectively filling a gap the Reichsbank could not.

The signature of Hermann Müller here is almost certainly a local official — Bürgermeister or treasurer — rather than any figure of wider record. Worth noting for collectors: the April 1945 print date suggests this particular impression was a late archival or commemorative reprint, not a note that ever functioned as currency.