10 Pfennig Bezirkssparkasse

Bezirkssparkasse Neustadt an der Saale was one of hundreds of German district savings banks that resorted to issuing Notgeld during the acute coin shortages of the First World War and its aftermath. This 10 Pfennig note, printed locally by Franz Scheiner in Würzburg, is a straightforward piece of small-denomination emergency currency — functional, regional, and produced to fill a gap that the Reichsbank had no interest in plugging at that level.

Scheiner was a Würzburg commercial printer, not a specialist security firm, which is exactly the point: by 1917–1918, material shortages and administrative pressure had pushed Notgeld production into the hands of whoever had a press and paper.