10 Cents Grant PoW Camp

Camp Grant, near Rockford, Illinois, functioned as one of the major prisoner of war processing and internment facilities in the United States during the Second World War, holding primarily German and Italian prisoners. The U.S. Army ran a scrip program across its POW camps to give detainees a medium of exchange for canteen purchases — real currency was prohibited inside the wire, both to prevent escape financing and to comply with Geneva Convention provisions requiring that prisoners be paid for labor.

Camp Grant scrip is among the scarcer examples of domestic U.S. POW camp money. The camp closed in 1946, and most scrip was pulled from circulation and destroyed at that point.