50 Pfennig Sparkasse

Neumarkt in Silesia — now Środa Śląska in Poland — was one of hundreds of German municipalities forced into emergency currency production during the postwar inflation crisis. This Sparkasse note is a product of that administrative scramble: local savings institutions, never intended to function as issuing banks, suddenly found themselves printing fractional denominations to keep daily commerce moving as metal coinage disappeared from circulation entirely.

Grass, Barth & Comp. handled an enormous volume of Notgeld work out of Breslau during this period, which kept production costs low but quality consistent across the region.