50 Pfennig

Plaue was a small industrial town on the Gera river, and like hundreds of German municipalities in 1921, it issued its own emergency small-change notes — Kleingeldscheine — to address the severe coin shortage that followed the First World War and the ensuing economic dislocation. These town-level issues were often locally designed, and the attribution to Max Bechstein of Ilmenau places this firmly in that regional cottage-industry tradition of Notgeld production.

The print date of 30 April 1945 is almost certainly a catalog or documentation error — that date is the day Berlin fell and Hitler died, by which point Thuringia was days from American occupation.