20 Mark

Fürth im Wald — a small border town in the Upper Palatinate, not to be confused with Fürth near Nuremberg — issued this note in 1918 as part of the vast wave of municipal emergency currency that flooded Germany in the final year of the war. The Reichsbank had effectively lost the ability to supply adequate small denomination notes to provincial communities, forcing district administrations to fill the gap themselves. Carl Gerber in Munich was a working commercial printer, not a security firm, which is why the guilloche underprint represents about the limit of what passed for fraud protection on issues like this.