50 Pfennig Humboldt Series - Issue 3

The Humboldt Series is one of the more coherent Notgeld sets to come out of Schwarzburg in the early 1920s inflation period — unusual in that a small Thuringian municipality commissioned Eduard Giltsch, a Jena printing house with serious art-reproduction credentials, rather than defaulting to one of the mass-market Notgeld printers churning out tourist-oriented issues at the time.

Giltsch had built its reputation on high-quality chromolithographic work, which shows in the series' registration and color fidelity. By Issue 3 of 1922, Germany's inflation was accelerating rapidly enough that the practical lifespan of any 50 Pfennig note was measured in weeks.