20 Mark

Fürstenwalde an der Spree was a mid-sized Brandenburg town whose municipal government — like hundreds of others across Germany in 1918 — issued Notgeld to compensate for the catastrophic disappearance of small and medium coinage from circulation. By that point the Reichsbank had largely lost control of subsidiary currency supply, and local authorities stepped in with whatever printing resources they had available.

A print run of over twelve million for a single municipal issue is exceptionally high for Stadtnotgeld of this denomination and suggests this note served genuine transactional demand rather than acting as the collectible tourist pieces that would flood the market in 1921–22.