2 Mark Eutin PoW Camp

Eutin, a small Schleswig-Holstein garrison town, hosted one of the German Empire's officer prisoner-of-war camps during the First World War. Under the 1907 Hague Convention, captured officers were entitled to pay commensurate with their rank — but the German authorities were not about to hand out Reichsmarks freely inside a camp. These internal scrip issues solved that problem: money valid only within the wire, usable at the canteen, and worthless the moment a prisoner escaped or was repatriated.

Officer camps typically generated far fewer surviving scrip examples than enlisted camps, simply because the populations were smaller and turnover slower.