1 Mark

Kranenburg is a small border town in the Lower Rhine region, sitting just inside Germany near the Dutch frontier. Its Notgeld issues, including this 1 Mark, were produced during the post-WWI currency chaos when municipal authorities across Germany were authorized — or simply compelled by circumstance — to print their own emergency money to cover local wage payments and retail transactions that federal coinage could no longer sustain.

Gebrüder Parcus in Munich printed enormous volumes of Notgeld for hundreds of small issuers during this period, which kept unit costs low but means their involvement alone says nothing about print quality or rarity. Scarcity here depends entirely on the original issue quantity, which Kranenburg's records do not reliably document.