50 Pfennigs

Cologne's postwar municipal finances were stretched well beyond what Reichsbank supplies could cover, and by 1922 the city — like hundreds of German municipalities — was printing its own fractional emergency money. What makes this note more than routine Notgeld is the signature: Konrad Adenauer, then serving as Oberbürgermeister of Cologne, a post he held from 1917 until his forced removal by the Nazis in 1933. He would later become West Germany's first Federal Chancellor in 1949.

Printed locally by J. P. Bachem, a Cologne-based Catholic press and publisher with deep roots in the city, not an outside security printer.