50 Pfennig

Bad Kleinen is a small railway junction town in Mecklenburg, notable mainly as the point where the lines from Lübeck and Wismar converge before heading toward Schwerin. Its 1922 Notgeld issue belongs to the vast second wave of municipal emergency currency that flooded Germany as chronic coin shortages and accelerating inflation made official small denominations functionally useless. By mid-1922 the Reichsbank had effectively ceded the pfennig denominations to any town willing to print them.

The issuing authority here is the municipality itself, not a savings bank or merchant consortium — a detail worth noting, as it affects redemption liability and explains why so many of these pieces were simply never presented for exchange.