As time went on, more and more towns and villages jumped on the band wagon to print their own money, so that eventually, individual towns were able to produce notes that depicted their town's buildings or things that were important to their identity. If the town produced a commodity, eg) silk (Bielefeld), then the notes quite often depicted these manufacturing processes. In the above example, several of the Bielefeld notgeld issues were actually printed on silk and linen. Local 'heroes' could be depicted as could scenes from round and about. So many of these notgeld were so colorful, that it was inevitable that collectors would soon become interested in them. Apart from metal issues, notgeld was usually made of paper. Occasionally it was issued in the form of card, silk, linen, jute, chamois leather, leather, aluminum foil, velvet and by using such things as playing cards (spielkarton). At the beginning of the war, 1914, the notgeld issues were drab and bland, with many issues having been signed and counter signed by hand. Some early notes in my collection have 3 hand written signatures on them. In 1921, when the phenomenon was at it's height, thousands upon thousands of 'sets' were being produced. In 1923, notgeld became affected by the runaway inflation that had hit the German economy and so inflationary notgeld began to emerge. If a German banknote has the word Reichbanknote on it, then it has been issued by the state.

This would be rather like an English banknote having been issued by the Bank of England. If it is a Reichbanknote then it is not a piece of notgeld (notes issued by towns and villages etc.etc.) Most notgeld will have the name of a town on it. Some will say something like this; Gutschein der Stadt.... Gutschein der Gemeinde..... Gutschein translates as 'voucher'.

Frequently notgeld is used as a broad brush term to indicate any and all emergency money but there are defined categories as follows:

Notgeld Categories

1. German notgeld of 1914-1915
2. Verkehrsausgaben 1916-1921 (circulating issues)
3. Grossgeld (larger than 1m) 1918-1921
4. Serienscheine (most common and most collected!)
5. Inflationary notgeld of 1922
6. Inflationary notgeld of 1923
7. Wertbestandiges notgeld (notes of fixed value eg) .5Kg of rice)
8. Kriegsgefangenenlager (P.O.W.)

Useful translation of words relating to Notgeld

• Kleingeld - notes of less than 1m in value
• Grossgeld - notes of 1m or over in value
• Gutschein - voucher or coupon
• heller - 1/100 Krone, so note is Austrian and not German!
• ohne datum - no date (undated)
• wasserzeichen - watermarked paper
• papier (Wasserliniertes) - paper with lines really close together
• Rathaus - town hall
• Sparkasse - savings bank
• Stadt - city or town
• verein - club
• Ungultig - no longer valid, cancelled.
• ohne datum (o.d) - without date
• ohne Wz - without watermark
• ohne WZ - without a value (on the note). Could refer to the corners of a note, where the boxes either say for example "75pf" or are just plain boxes.
• ohne KN - without Konto Number (account/serial number)
• mit KN - with " "

How many notes were issued?

• 5,500 varieties of 1914, issued by 452 places.
• 36,000 varieties of 1915-1922, small value notes (Kleingeld), issued by 3,658 places.
• 5,000 varieties of 1918-1919, larger denominations (Grossgeld), issued by 579 places.
• 4,000 varieties of 1922, between 100 & 1000Mk, issued by 800 places.
• 70,000 varieties of 1923, inflationary notes, issued by 5,849 places.
• 3,660 varieties of 1923/4 notes of constant value (Wertbestandiges), issued by 562 places.
• 3,000 varieties of P.O.W. notes, issued by 600 issu-ing locations.

These figures are based on the findings of Dr. Arnold Keller, a collector, then dealer, then author of notgeld related books, who died in Berlin in December 1972. Any true collector of notgeld will have undoubtedly, come across his name. If you take all types of minor varieties into account, then the number, I have heard, is more like 163,000 in total.

Serienscheine basic issues, listed by K. Lindman in his 'Band 1: Grundausgaben' catalogue ....... 8810 notes.