20 Mark

Offenburg's city council issued this note in 1918 under the emergency currency provisions that allowed German municipalities to fill the void left by an increasingly dysfunctional Reichsbank supply chain. The 20 Mark denomination was unusually high for municipal notgeld of this period — most city councils stuck to smaller face values to avoid competing too visibly with official currency.

The watermarked paper is the one technically significant detail here. Most notgeld relied purely on printing complexity for what little security it offered; commissioning watermarked stock suggests either a local paper supplier with the capability on hand or a deliberate effort by Offenburg's council to discourage forgery at a moment when civic confidence in paper money was already badly strained.