50 Pfennigs

Geestemünde — the port city at the mouth of the Geeste river — was absorbed into the newly created city of Bremerhaven in 1924, which gives this 1920 Sparkasse issue an inadvertent finality: the municipal savings institution that signed it would cease to exist as a distinct entity within four years. The note belongs to the vast wave of German Kleingeldersatz emergency coinage substitutes produced as metal shortages and postwar inflation made low-denomination coins impossible to keep in circulation.

Franz Scherrer of Hannover was a minor regional printer responsible for numerous Notgeld contracts across Lower Saxony.