50 Pfennigs

Heldburg is a small Thuringian town best known for the Veste Heldburg, a hilltop castle that Bismarck once described as the "Franconian Lantern" for its prominence above the surrounding plain. Its appearance on a municipal emergency note is a reminder of just how far the Notgeld phenomenon reached — even communities of a few thousand residents were issuing their own scrip by 1921, partly out of practical necessity and partly because elaborately printed local notes had become a minor collecting craze that municipalities exploited to generate income.

Schneider & Co. in Ilmenau handled a substantial volume of Thuringian Notgeld during this period, and the DeNG reference number suggests at least three distinct design variants within this issue.