50 Pfennig

Ströbeck is a village in Saxony-Anhalt with a documented chess-playing tradition stretching back at least to the 11th century — a tradition so embedded in local identity that chess imagery appeared on its Notgeld issues during the inflationary emergency of the early 1920s. The municipality was one of hundreds of small German issuers producing small-denomination paper during the period when coinage had effectively disappeared from circulation due to hoarding and metal shortages following the First World War.

J. P. Himmer in Augsburg was a prolific Notgeld printer and handled runs for numerous municipalities across southern and central Germany. The chess connection made Ströbeck's notes among the more sought-after of the purely utilitarian municipal issues — collectors acquired them specifically for the novelty, which means genuinely circulated examples are proportionally harder to find than cancelled or unissued remainders.