1 Mark

Brakel is a small market town in the Teutoburg Forest region, and its municipal emergency money — Notgeld — belongs to the enormous wave of locally issued scrip that flooded Germany between 1919 and 1922 as coin shortages made everyday transactions nearly impossible. The Magistrat zu Brakel had no special printing authority; like hundreds of other German municipalities, it simply commissioned notes to fill the gap left by the Reichsbank's inability to supply sufficient small-denomination coinage during the postwar economic dislocation.

The DeNG reference places this among the documented Kleingeldscheine of Kreis Höxter — a district that produced a disproportionate number of collector-targeted issues in this period, though Brakel's series is modest by those standards.