1 Mark

Helgoland's notgeld issues of 1920 occupy a peculiar corner of German emergency money. The island had been British territory from 1807 until 1890, when Germany exchanged Zanzibar and other East African concessions for it under the Heligoland–Zanzibar Treaty — a swap that struck many contemporaries as spectacularly lopsided. By 1920 it was a German municipality scraping together its own paper to cover a coin shortage, like hundreds of other small issuers that year.

J. Adolf Schwarz of Lindenberg im Allgäu was a minor regional printer responsible for a number of Bavarian and southwestern German notgeld runs. Nothing about this production is exceptional, but the issuing authority — a wind-battered North Sea island of barely a square kilometer — is not one you encounter often in notgeld inventories.