50 Pfennigs

Bismark in the Altmark — a small market town in Saxony-Anhalt — shares its name with the Iron Chancellor but has no direct connection to him beyond geography. The Magistrat issued this Notgeld note during the postwar small-change crisis of 1920–1921, when a chronic shortage of coin forced hundreds of German municipalities to print their own emergency fractional currency. The Reichsbank tolerated the practice as a stopgap, but by late 1922 runaway inflation had made all such low-denomination scrip economically worthless before most of it could even be redeemed.