50 Pfennigs

Striegau's municipal savings bank issued this note as part of the widespread Kleingeldersatz emergency — small-denomination Notgeld produced by hundreds of German towns and cities to address the acute coin shortage that followed the First World War. The Reichsbank had essentially ceased supplying pfennig coinage in usable quantities, forcing local institutions to fill the gap themselves.

Striegau, a mid-sized Silesian town known primarily for its granite quarrying, had no professional printing infrastructure on the scale of Leipzig or Berlin. Notes issued from such provincial printers often show inconsistent ink saturation and minor registration drift — worth examining on any example.