Today, instead of new scans I am going to share some more information I have found while researching Notgeld. Richard Holmes has a lot of great information on Notgeld, as well as informative links, on his web-page German Inflationary Notgeld 1922 - 1923.
Richard states on his web-page: After WWI, Germany was plunged into one of the worst inflations ever to hit a western country as the government struggled with the truly massive punitive damages demanded by the Treaty of Versailles. During this brief period of hyper-inflation, people who did not convert their savings into tangible assets lost them completely . Many bank accounts were closed because even large pre-war sums of 100,000 Marks were longer worth even the price of a postage stamp. The middle class was by and large reduced to poverty, theft and petty crime soared, pensions became worthless and many people starved to death.
Below are two examples of "high value" notes that were printed to cope with the runaway inflation of the day. The first note is a Private Company Issue by Phoenix Mining, 5 Billionen Mark (5 Trillion Marks).
This is a Reichsbahn (German Rail) Issue, 10 Billionen Mark (10 Trillion Marks).
I thought that the one below was quite interesting it is a Munster Landesbank Regional Issue, 4.2 Goldmark / 1 Dollar deniminated.
* Note that in German "eine Milliarde" means 1,000,000,000 (an American billion) and "eine Billion" means 1,000,000,000,000 (an American trillion)
These three scans are courtesy of Richard Holmes. Please visit the Richard Holmes's Homepage.
© 2008 Barry T Horst
This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.
