20 Mark

Ulm's municipal administration issued this Gutschein during the severe currency shortages of late 1918, as the German imperial financial system buckled under wartime strain and Reichsbank notes became impossible to obtain in sufficient quantity for local commerce. Cities, towns, and even individual businesses across Germany were by then issuing their own emergency money — Notgeld in its truest sense, not the decorative collector-targeted issues that followed in 1920–21.

Dr. K. Höhn was a local Ulm printer, not a specialist security press. The stamp was the primary fraud deterrent — a common workaround when purpose-built security printing was unavailable.