20 Francs Stembert

Stembert was a small industrial commune in the Liège arrondissement, and like dozens of Belgian municipalities caught unprepared by the German invasion of August 1914, it issued emergency fractional and low-denomination paper to replace metal coinage that had vanished almost overnight into hoarding and requisition. These commune-level notes were never centrally coordinated — each town improvised its own typography, authorization stamps, and signatory arrangements, which is why the series varies so wildly in paper quality and execution from one village to the next.

Stembert was absorbed into the city of Verviers in 1977, making the issuing authority itself long extinct.