2 Mark Köln; Officer PoW Camp

Offizier-Gefangenenlager Köln was one of several German camps that issued internal scrip during the First World War to allow officer prisoners — who, under the Hague Conventions, could not be compelled to labor — to make purchases within the camp economy. These notes substituted for Reichsmark currency, which prisoners were not permitted to hold freely, and circulated only within the wire.

M. DuMont Schauberg, the Cologne press that produced this note, was one of Germany's oldest newspaper publishers. Using a local commercial printer for camp scrip was entirely typical of the improvised logistics of 1918, by which point the German military administration had more urgent things to coordinate than bespoke security printing.

Most camp scrip was destroyed or discarded at the armistice. Surviving examples reached the market through former prisoners who kept them as souvenirs.