50 Pfennigs

Erkelenz is a small Rhineland district that, like hundreds of German administrative bodies, began issuing Notgeld in 1917 as the Imperial coinage system buckled under wartime metal requisitioning. The Kreis-Ausschuss — the district committee — had no printing authority in any formal monetary sense; these notes were emergency municipal scrip, tolerated rather than sanctioned by Berlin, and redeemable only within the issuing district.

The DeNG 5 reference places this squarely in the first wave of necessity issues, before the later 1920–1922 collector-targeted Notgeld flooded the market and made the earlier utilitarian pieces genuinely harder to source.