50 Pfennigs

Eckartsberga is a small town in Saxony-Anhalt, and like hundreds of similarly sized German municipalities in 1921, its local government stepped in to print its own fractional currency when the Reichsbank could not keep small-denomination coin in circulation fast enough to meet demand. This was the Kleingeldersatz phenomenon — emergency substitute coinage in paper form — driven by postwar metal shortages and the early inflationary pressures that would fully detonate by 1923.

Reineck & Klein of Weimar handled a considerable volume of this municipal notgeld work across Thuringia. The print run for a community this size would have been modest, and local redemption periods were often short and poorly publicized, leaving many notes unredeemed by design or neglect.