50 Pfennigs

Wörlitz — a small town in Anhalt with a population that barely justified its own notgeld series — issued this 50 Pfennig note during the acute small-change shortage that paralyzed German commerce in the early 1920s. Thousands of German municipalities did the same, but Wörlitz's output was modest enough that its issues attracted collector attention almost immediately upon release, a common problem with notgeld by 1922: local authorities were printing for philatelists as much as for commerce.

By late 1923 the hyperinflation that made 50 Pfennig notes absurd had rendered the entire notgeld system obsolete.