20 Pfennigs Celle PoW Camp

Cellelager was one of several German officer prisoner-of-war camps operating under the Geneva Convention's requirement that officer prisoners not be compelled to work — leaving camp authorities with the administrative headache of managing men who had money, time, and no obligation. Scrip like this resolved a practical problem: it kept foreign currency out of circulation within the camp while still permitting canteen purchases and small transactions between prisoners.

J. P. Himmer of Augsburg printed numerous PoW camp issues during the war years, handling runs for facilities across Germany. The perfin security feature — a pattern of small punched holes — was a low-cost deterrent against forgery or smuggling scrip out of camp, where it might otherwise have passed as something more useful.