1 Rupie

By 1915, the British naval blockade had severed German East Africa from any realistic prospect of imported currency stock. Governor Heinrich Schnee's administration turned to the colony's own print infrastructure — the Deutsch-Ostafrikanische Zeitung in Dar es Salaam, a newspaper press, not a security printer. The result was a wartime emergency issue produced under conditions that no central bank would have sanctioned in peacetime.

Paper quality varied between print runs, and the notes were never difficult to replicate — a problem the colonial government acknowledged but had no practical way to solve. Lettow-Vorbeck's bush campaign meant that by the time many of these notes circulated inland, the issuing authority's grip on the territory was already contracting.