50 Pfennig

Schwäbisch Gmünd's 1921 Notgeld issues belong to the second wave of German municipal emergency currency — by this point the Reichsbank's chronic shortage of small-denomination coins had forced hundreds of towns to print their own. Gmünd, a goldsmithing center in Württemberg with genuine craft heritage, produced notes that leaned into that local identity rather than defaulting to generic civic imagery. The third type in this three-part series (hence the /3 suffix in the Pick reference) suggests the city returned to press more than once as inflation accelerated through 1921.

Württemberg Notgeld from this period was not centrally coordinated — each municipality negotiated its own printer and design, which accounts for the wide variation in paper quality across surviving examples from the region.