1.000 Złotych

The Bank Emisyjny w Polsce was not a Polish institution in any meaningful sense — it was a German-controlled issuing authority established in April 1940 to administer currency in the General Government, the occupied Polish territory not incorporated directly into the Reich. Notes issued under this authority were the only legal tender in that zone, deliberately severed from the pre-war złoty system to prevent Poles from drawing on reserves held by the Polish government-in-exile.

Printing in Kraków, under German occupation, was itself a political act — placing production on occupied soil rather than routing it through German state printers helped maintain the fiction of a separate administered territory. The 1941 date places this note squarely in the period of heaviest wartime economic exploitation, when forced requisitioning and price controls were driving severe inflation against which this denomination offered little real protection.

P#103A distinguishes the note from later signature varieties in the same series.