50 Pfennig Vorschuß- und Sparverein

Ostheim vor der Rhön sits on what was, in 1918, the border between the Prussian province of Hessen-Nassau and the Duchy of Saxe-Meiningen — a small market town with no particular monetary clout. The note was issued not by a municipality or savings bank but by a registered cooperative with unlimited liability, the local credit union, which tells you something about how badly small change had dried up by the final year of the war. Pfennig coinage had effectively vanished from circulation, hoarded or melted, and thousands of such Notgeld issues filled the void.

Selmar Bayer in Berlin handled enormous volumes of this emergency small-denomination printing for cooperatives and merchants across Germany.