10 Pfennig Grottkau

Grottkau — now Grodków in southwestern Poland — issued this small-denomination Notgeld during the acute coin shortage that gripped Germany from 1916 onward, when the Reichsbank's copper and nickel disappeared into the war machine. Municipal authorities across the Reich were forced to fill the gap themselves, and the Magistrat der Stadt Grottkau was among thousands of local bodies to do so. The 10 Pfennig denomination was the workhorse of everyday small transactions — tram fares, bread, postage — exactly what metal coinage had covered before.

Silesian Notgeld of this type was typically lithographed locally, often on thin stock that aged poorly. Crisp survivors are proportionally rarer than their original print runs would suggest.