20 Mark

Danzig's municipal notgeld issues of 1918 occupy an awkward historical moment: the city was still firmly German, the war not yet lost, but conventional currency had been hoarded and fractured supply chains made Reichsbank notes scarce in local circulation. The Stadtgemeinde stepped in, as dozens of German cities did that year, with emergency issues backed by municipal credit rather than central authority.

Julius Sauer was a Danzig-based artist, which makes this a genuinely local production — not a Frankfurt or Berlin printer filling a contract. The watermarked paper was the primary concession to security; series of this type were vulnerable to simple copying, and watermarking distinguished the municipal issues from outright forgeries circulating in the same period.