50 Pfennig

Swinemünde — now Świnoujście, Poland — was a busy Baltic port town under German administration when this Notgeld piece was issued. Emergency municipal currency of this kind proliferated across Germany after 1914 as small-denomination coins vanished from circulation, hoarded by a public increasingly distrustful of the wartime economy. The Magistrat here contracted J. C. König & Ebhardt, a well-established Hannover printing house with deep roots in quality paper and stationery production — an unsurprising choice for a municipality wanting something more credible than the crude cardboard scrip many smaller towns were producing.

The watermarked paper is worth noting: not all Notgeld issues bothered with security features, and its presence here suggests the Magistrat was concerned about local counterfeiting or at minimum wanted to project institutional legitimacy during an unstable period.