1 Mark

Altheide — now Polanica-Zdrój — was a spa town in the Glatzer Kessel, the enclosed basin around Glatz that formed one of the more self-contained corners of Silesia. This note is Notgeld, emergency municipal currency, almost certainly issued during the acute small-change shortage that gripped Germany and its occupied territories between 1914 and the early 1920s. L. Schirmer was a local Glatz printer with no particular prestige — the kind of firm that produced dozens of nearly identical municipal issues across the region, varying only in the issuing authority's name.

Altheide's thermal baths brought seasonal visitors, which may have created more demand for small denomination exchange than a town of its size would otherwise require.