50 Pfennig

Lehesten is a small slate-mining town in the Thuringian Highlands — its quarries supplied roofing slate across central Europe for centuries. This Notgeld issue from 1921 sits in the second wave of German emergency money, by which point municipalities had largely shifted from wartime necessity to something closer to civic vanity: locally printed, locally signed, sometimes collected more than spent.

Merzdorf & Frosch in nearby Saalfeld handled a number of Thuringian Notgeld commissions during this period. The single Obenaus signature — almost certainly a municipal treasurer or Bürgermeister — was standard sign-off for issues of this denomination and authority level.