50 Pfennig

Wildeshausen is a small town in Lower Saxony, and its 1921 notgeld issue belongs to the second wave of German municipal emergency currency — printed not from wartime necessity but from the chronic small-change shortage that persisted well into the Weimar period. By 1921, coin metal was still being withheld from circulation by a public that had watched metal coinage disappear during the war and trusted it more than paper.

Municipal notgeld of this type was typically printed in short runs by regional printers, often on whatever paper stock was available, making consistent paper quality across a single series genuinely variable. The issuing authority here is the Magistrat — the civic administrative body — rather than a savings bank or commercial chamber, which was the more common notgeld source in larger towns.