10 Mark

Freiberg, in Saxony, had been a silver-mining center since the twelfth century — its Erzgebirge mines supplied much of the metal that backed German coinage for generations. There is a particular irony in a city so historically tied to hard money resorting to paper Notgeld in 1918, as the wartime coin shortage stripped everyday transactions of anything metallic worth keeping. Municipal authorities across Germany were doing the same, but the provenance here is sharper than most.

Krey & Sommerlad in Niedersedlitz were a mid-tier commercial printer handling substantial regional Notgeld contracts during this period. The watermark security feature is modest but deliberate — more about deterring local forgery than any sophisticated anti-counterfeiting scheme. Designer Rieß is otherwise obscure in the Notgeld record.