2 Mark

Holzminden is a small town on the Weser River in Lower Saxony, and its municipal notgeld was a direct product of the coin shortage that gripped Germany following the First World War. By 1921 the crisis had deepened enough that hundreds of municipalities — including towns with no particular financial infrastructure — were authorizing their own emergency paper. Gebrüder Jänecke in Hannover was one of the more prolific regional printers handling these contracts, producing notgeld for numerous Lower Saxony issuers during this period.

The 2 Mark denomination sits at the upper end of the municipal notgeld range, where redemption guarantees were increasingly difficult to enforce as inflation accelerated through 1921 and into 1922.