50 Pfennig

Sondershausen was the former capital of the tiny principality of Schwarzburg-Sondershausen, which had ceased to exist barely four years before this note was issued — the prince abdicated in November 1918. By 1922, the municipal government was printing its own fractional emergency currency, as were hundreds of German towns, because the Reichsbank simply could not produce small-denomination coinage fast enough to keep pace with accelerating inflation.

The Magistrat designation reflects the town's brief status as a kreisfreie Stadt, administratively independent from the surrounding district. That status would not survive the broader Thuringian territorial reorganizations of the mid-1920s.