50 Pfennigs

Krefeld's 1917 municipal emergency money belongs to the first serious wave of German Kleingeldersatz — the substitution coinage crisis that hit in 1916–17 as metal hoarding stripped small change from everyday transactions. Cities, towns, utilities, and private firms were authorized to print their own fractional paper, and thousands did. Most Notgeld from this period was purely functional: printed locally on whatever press was available, with no particular ambition.

The underprint is the one concession to anti-counterfeiting — a low-cost measure widely adopted by issuing municipalities that lacked access to more sophisticated security printing.