50 Pfennig

Cottbus issued this Notgeld note in 1918 under severe wartime coin shortages that had stripped small denominations from everyday commerce across Germany. Municipal authorities — not the Reichsbank — were left to fill the gap, and hundreds of towns printed their own emergency fractional currency that year. Carl Flemming AG in Berlin was a well-established commercial printer with deep roots in cartographic and fine printing work, an unusual pedigree for emergency currency but not uncommon among the contracted firms of that period.

At 70 × 50 mm, this is among the smaller Notgeld formats produced, reflecting the modest production budgets most municipal magistrates were working with in the final year of the war.