During the Inflation years
of 1922 and 1923 Notgeld (German for emergency money) in high denominations (larger than 1 Mark)
was issued. Normally all larger paper money in Germany was issued by the
central banks - the Reichsbank and
regional Privatnotenbanken.
On 17. July 1922 a law was enacted by the German government
that made it illegal to produce Notgeld. However the sheer impossibility to guaranty the money supply
made it necessary to grant licenses for other bodies than the central banks to produce means of payment.
Restrictions applied but the new issuing bodies did not always comply with them. Municipalities,
firms, the railways, and private banks now started to gave out emergency money beside the Reichsbank.
Notgeld and Reichsbanknoten - what is real money?
All banknotes that do not show the official description "Banknote" are emergency money. Still only the
central banks were allowed to issue the legal tender "Mark" as banknote.
The Notgeld together with the
high-denomination banknotes issued by the central banks is
also frequently referred to as Papiermark (English: Mark of paper).
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The "Reichsbank" (the main central bank) should not be mistaken by the
"Reichsbahn"
(the German railways), which also issued money - emergency money that is. The notes
of the railways were endorsed by the Central bank and government and widely used in
Germany due to the presence of its large branch network.
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The Reichsbank regularly defined and announced the exchange rate of the Mark towards the Dollar.
Based on this exchange rate the economy was synchronised. Money was printed and given out in
accordance. Prices for goods and services were fixed the same way.
Some Notgeld notes were
printed on material other than paper: leather, silk, cotton, linen, aluminium
foil, etc. To give their notes a better recognition of value some emergency money was associated with
goods, e.g. promised to be convertible to a pound of rye. There were also Goldmark issues, which were,
however, not covered by Gold and therefore had limited appeal.
The problem of Money Supply
Some Notgeld notes were printed on material other than paper: leather, silk, cotton, linen, aluminium
foil, etc. To give their notes a better recognition of value some emergency money was associated with
goods, e.g. promised to be convertible to a pound of rye. There were also Goldmark issues, which
were, however, not covered by Gold and therefore had limited appeal.
Sometimes the devaluation was faster than the logistics of issuing notes. In these cases banknotes were
often overprinted and issued at a higher value than initially planned. An example is the
1000 Mark note from 1922, which was never issued,
but only in the overprinted version (these are
not Notgeld, however!).
During the years 1922 and 1923 about 75,000 - 80,000 different series of Notgeld had been
issued. By end of November 1923 the Hyperinflation could be stopped by economic and monetary
reforms under the lead of central banker
Hjalmar Schacht (1877 - 1970). The emergency money
became obsolete and was replaced by the Rentenmark. Later many notes were reused for
advertising and propaganda purposes.
To view Notgeld from the inflation era please select from the
list of towns or
firms, for which
we have a selection of emergency money on display.
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