50 Pfennige

Lüneburg's municipal administration issued this note under the emergency currency provisions that proliferated across German towns and cities from 1914 onward, as the wartime hoarding of metal coins created acute small-change shortages. The von Stern'sche Buchdruckerei was a local printing house — not a specialist security printer — and the limitations of that choice show in the relatively simple typography-based design, which relied on official overprinting and paper stock rather than intaglio or complex anti-counterfeiting measures.

By 1917 the Notgeld phenomenon had become semi-institutionalized, with municipal treasuries issuing in volumes that occasionally exceeded local demand. Lüneburg's series is among the more administratively straightforward of Lower Saxony's wartime issues.