50 Pfennig

Königswinter is a small Rhine town at the foot of the Siebengebirge, and this 1921 Notgeld issue is very much a product of the postwar small-change crisis that forced thousands of German municipalities to print their own emergency scrip. The central government's inability to supply adequate coin drove local authorities — cities, towns, even individual merchants — to issue notes that technically had no legal backing beyond local goodwill and the expectation of eventual redemption.

Frz. J. Krings as designer suggests local artistic commission rather than a professional printing house's stock template, which was common for smaller Rhineland communities seeking to produce something distinctive enough to appeal to the growing collector market that had already begun absorbing Notgeld as a secondary revenue stream by 1921.