50 Pfennig

Friedeberg in der Neumark — today Strzelce Krajeńskie in western Poland — issued this Notgeld piece during the acute small-change famine that gripped Germany in 1920, when metal coins had largely vanished from circulation and the Reichsbank could not keep pace with demand at the municipal level. Thousands of German towns printed their own fractional notes during this period, with Selmar Bayer in Berlin supplying a substantial share of the production runs for smaller Prussian municipalities.

The printer relationship is worth noting: Bayer handled volume municipal work, not prestige commissions, so execution across the series tends toward the competent rather than the elaborate.