50 Pfennigs

Freyburg an der Unstrut is a small wine-producing town in Saxony-Anhalt, and this 50 Pfennig Notgeld note is precisely the kind of municipal emergency scrip that flooded Germany during the postwar inflation spiral of 1921. Hundreds of German towns issued their own small-denomination notes when the Reichsbank could no longer keep coinage in circulation — hoarding and metal shortages had stripped the economy of small change almost entirely.

Otto Richters & Co. in Erfurt handled a substantial volume of Notgeld printing for Thuringian and Saxon municipalities during this period, which makes their output identifiable but not rare. Signed by two town officials, Dietrich and Tischer, whose exact municipal roles are unrecorded in surviving administrative documents.