50 Pfennigs

Eisleben's municipal authority issued this note in 1917 as the German small-change shortage — caused by coin hoarding and wartime metal demands — forced hundreds of town councils to print their own emergency currency. These Kriegsnotgeld issues were technically illegal under Reich law but were quietly tolerated out of necessity. Adolf Forker was a minor Leipzig commercial printer, not a security printing house, which shows in the relatively simple production. Eisleben, a small mining town in Prussian Saxony, had neither the resources nor the bureaucratic machinery to commission anything more sophisticated.