50 Pfennigs

Neustadt O.S. — Neustadt in Oberschlesien — issued this Notgeld at a moment of acute political instability. The 1919 plebiscite question over Upper Silesia's future between Germany and the newly reconstituted Poland was already hardening into a genuine crisis, and the local magistracy, like dozens of other Upper Silesian municipalities that year, filled the small-change vacuum left by the collapse of imperial coinage with its own emergency paper.

Korn of Breslau was a workhorse printer for Silesian municipal Notgeld — reliable, local, unremarkable in ambition. The notes were functional instruments, not collector pieces, though the plebiscite turmoil that followed in 1921 and the subsequent partition means many were never redeemed.