50 Pfennig - Münsterberg

Münsterberg — today Ziębice in southwestern Poland — issued this Notgeld piece through its municipal savings bank during the postwar inflationary spiral that made Reichsbank coinage disappear from circulation almost overnight. Aluminum was the practical choice: cheap, abundant, and workable by local die-cutters without the infrastructure of a proper mint. Thousands of German and Austrian municipalities did the same between 1918 and 1923, producing a fragmented emergency currency system that the Reichsbank tolerated because it had no immediate alternative.

The Funck reference places this among the later aluminum varieties of the Münsterberg series.