50 Pfennig

Ohrdruf is a small Thuringian town best known — at least to music historians — as the place where Johann Sebastian Bach spent his formative adolescent years under his elder brother Johann Christoph. Whether the city fathers had that association in mind when commissioning their Notgeld series is unknowable, but Gebrüder Parcus in Munich produced competent work for dozens of German municipalities during the inflationary emergency period, and this 50 Pfennig piece sits squarely in that 1921 wave of locally authorized small-denomination scrip issued to relieve the chronic coin shortage following the war.

The signatory Rotter, acting on behalf of Der Stadtrat, was typical of the municipal clerk-level authorization these notes carried — legally sufficient, administratively unremarkable.