50 Pfennig

Lehesten, a small quarry town in the Thuringian Slate Mountains, issued this Notgeld during the postwar emergency that left municipal and commercial issuers filling the coin shortage left by wartime metal requisitioning. The slate industry defined the town entirely — Lehesten's quarries had supplied roofing slate across Central Europe for centuries, and the community had little economic identity apart from them.

Small-town Thuringian Notgeld from 1920 was produced by a handful of regional printers, often in short runs with no redemption infrastructure beyond local goodwill. Many pieces were never redeemed at all, absorbed instead by the collector market that had already begun treating Notgeld as a collecting category before the inflation crisis even peaked.