50 Pfennig

Eckartsberga is a small town in Saxony-Anhalt, and like hundreds of similarly sized German municipalities in 1921, its local Magistrat issued Notgeld to plug the chronic shortage of small change that had been grinding through the German economy since the war. The Reichsbank could not keep pace with demand at the fractional level, so local authorities — town councils, merchant associations, even individual businesses — filled the gap themselves.

These municipal 50 Pfennig pieces were typically printed in short runs and redeemed within months, which ironically drove collectors to acquire them unused, making circulated examples harder to find than uncirculated ones.