50 Pfennig

Treuenbrietzen is a small Brandenburg town with a population that barely justified its own emergency currency, but like thousands of German municipalities in 1921, it issued notgeld anyway — partly out of necessity as coin shortages persisted well past the armistice, and partly because the collector market had turned municipal scrip into a minor revenue stream. Towns competed for attractive designs knowing philatelic demand would keep much of the print run permanently unspent.

J. A. Schwarz of Lindenberg im Allgäu was a prolific notgeld printer serving municipalities far outside its immediate region, a detail that underscores how industrialized the whole enterprise had become by 1921.