50 Pfennig

Boizenburg's 50 Pfennig Notgeld belongs to the enormous wave of municipal emergency currency that flooded Germany between 1914 and the early 1920s, when coin shortages — caused first by wartime metal requisitioning and later by rampant inflation — forced towns of every size to print their own substitute money. Boizenburg, a small river town on the Elbe in Mecklenburg, was typical of hundreds of municipalities that commissioned local or regional designers to produce notes with some civic distinction.

Richard Zschened is not a widely documented figure in Notgeld design literature, which suggests a regional or local commission rather than one of the established specialty printers who dominated the later "collector Notgeld" trade after 1921.