10 Deutsche Mark 50 Years SOS Kinderdörfer

SOS-Kinderdorf was founded in 1949 by Austrian Hermann Gmeiner, who had watched post-war Europe fill with orphaned and displaced children and concluded that institutional care was failing them. His model — small family-style houses, each run by a single house mother — spread from the original village in Imst, Tyrol, to over 130 countries within five decades. Germany issued this commemorative in the organization's jubilee year, one of the few cases where a German silver ten-mark piece honors a private humanitarian body rather than a state institution or historical figure.