50 Pfennig Pless

Pless — now Pszczyna in southern Poland — was one of hundreds of German municipalities that issued Notgeld during the final year of the war, when small-denomination coinage had essentially vanished from circulation, hoarded or melted. The Magistrat's 50 Pfennig note belongs to the first wave of emergency municipal issues, predating the more decorative Serienscheine that flooded the market from 1920 onward.

Upper Silesia's postwar fate — partition between Germany and Poland following the 1921 plebiscite and subsequent League of Nations arbitration — meant that many local municipal issues from this border region circulated only briefly before the administrative structures that backed them ceased to exist entirely.