50 Pfennig - Nürnberg A. Herbst and M. Ostertag Baugeschäft

Notgeld issued by a private construction firm — Herbst and Ostertag's building company — during the acute small-change shortage that followed Germany's post-WWI economic dislocation. Municipalities, businesses, and even individual firms across Germany issued their own emergency currency between 1918 and 1923 when the Reichsbank could not keep pace with demand for low-denomination coins. Zinc was the material of necessity: copper and nickel had been consumed by the war economy, and their civilian use remained restricted well into the early 1920s.

A construction company issuing its own scrip is unusual even within the broad Notgeld corpus — most private issuers were retailers or service businesses with large daily transaction volumes in small denominations.