50 Pfennig

Adorf im Vogtland is a small Saxon textile town, and like hundreds of similar municipalities it resorted to printing its own Kleingeldersatz during the coin shortage that gripped Germany from 1916 onward. The Reichsbank's metal coinage had been absorbed almost entirely by wartime industrial demand, leaving local commerce without workable small change. Municipal notgeld was the pragmatic answer — locally authorized, locally spent, theoretically redeemable but in practice often not.

The embossed seal was the issuer's primary tool against casual counterfeiting, given that sophisticated security printing was beyond what a town administration could commission cheaply. DeNG 5/6#A2 distinguishes this as the second major variety in the Adorf series.