0.50 Reichsmark Auschwitz Concentration Camp

These scrip notes were issued by the SS administration at Auschwitz as part of a fiction of compensated labor — prisoners assigned to certain work details received them in lieu of wages, then spent them at camp canteens stocked with goods the SS itself controlled. The economic loop was entirely closed. No real purchasing power existed outside the wire, and the scrip was worthless the moment a prisoner was transferred, selected, or killed.

Surviving examples are rare not because of attrition in the way ordinary banknotes wear out, but because few prisoners survived to carry them out. Most known specimens come from liberated camp archives or postwar evidence collections.