25 Pfennig, Stadt Zörbig, 1921 (Oberamtmann Jäger)

By 1920 German Notgeld had become a collector's product. Towns commissioned decorative Serienscheine - lithographed sets printed far beyond any local need and sold to collectors, illustrated with whatever the place was proud of. Zörbig, a small town in Anhalt (today Saxony-Anhalt), built its 1921 series around its notable sons. Each note shares a face of a winged genius holding the town's blue-and-gold striped shield, Notgeld der Stadt Zörbig / 25 Pfennig, and carries on the back a portrait and short biography of a local worthy, a Roman series numeral and the Zörbig skyline, under the motto So helfen wir uns mit Papier - "thus we help ourselves with paper." The notes were designed by H. Schiebel and printed at Bitterfeld in 1921.

Zörbig's great local industry was tobacco: the sandy soil of this corner of the Halle lowlands made it one of the earliest German tobacco-growing districts, with a tobacco factory documented in the town by 1817. This note honours the man the town credits with that inheritance, the Oberamtmann (chief bailiff) B. Jäger, who is remembered for introducing tobacco cultivation locally and for setting up the first tobacco factory at the Dorotheenhof, the estate just outside the town.

Little about Jäger has been independently verified beyond the note itself and local tradition, and the note should be read as commemorating him in that spirit: a local benefactor whose enterprise is said to have founded the trade that made Zörbig prosperous. The Dorotheenhof and the town's tobacco factory are the historical anchors of the story; the honour the note pays its Oberamtmann is the town's own.