50 Pfennig

Stotel is a small village in Lower Saxony, and like hundreds of German municipalities in 1921, it issued its own emergency currency — Notgeld — as coin shortages and rampant inflation made official small change functionally useless. The issuing authority here is the Gemeinde itself, not a local savings bank or merchant association, which was common at this scale. C. A. Nicolaus of Bremen handled a significant volume of municipal Notgeld contracts across the region during this period, and the presence of a watermark on a note of this denomination is worth noting — many comparable village issues dispensed with security features entirely.