1 Mark Eschwege; P.O.W. Camp

Eschwege was a dedicated officers' prisoner-of-war camp — an Offizierslager — in Hesse-Nassau, and the Kommandantur issued its own internal currency precisely because the Hague Convention of 1907 prohibited forcing officers to work, leaving them with pay entitlements but no safe mechanism for spending. Camp scrip solved the accountability problem: it could not be smuggled out to fund escapes the way Reichsmarks could, and it kept genuine currency out of prisoner hands entirely.

WWI German camp issues of this type were printed in small runs by local or regional printers with no standardized format across camps, which makes attribution and survival rates genuinely difficult to track.