50 Pfennig

Neurode — now Nowa Ruda in southwestern Poland — was a coal-mining town in Lower Silesia whose municipal authority, like hundreds of German cities and towns in 1921, issued its own emergency small-change notes (Kleingeldscheine) to compensate for the acute coin shortage that followed the First World War. The Reichsbank could not keep fractional coinage in circulation fast enough; hoarding and metal scarcity had stripped it from commerce entirely.

The Magistrat series from Neurode falls within the broader Notgeld phenomenon, but by 1921 many issues had shifted from genuine necessity toward collector-driven production — towns printed attractive, thematic notes knowing philatelists would buy and hold them, never returning them for redemption.