1 Mark Bremer Woll-Kämmerei

Bremer Woll-Kämmerei was one of the largest wool combing operations in continental Europe, and when the Reichsbank's coin hoarding crisis hit in August 1914, the company issued its own emergency scrip to keep wages moving on the factory floor. This is Notgeld in its most functional, unglamorous form — a private industrial employer filling a gap the state briefly couldn't.

Blumenthal, at the time an independent municipality north of Bremen and not yet incorporated into it, had a substantial working-class population almost entirely dependent on the mill. The rubber stamp authentication was the company's only real security measure against forgery.