3 Mark

Tilsit — today Sovetsk, in the Kaliningrad enclave — issued this municipal emergency note during the prolonged Weimar-era small-change crisis that followed hyperinflation's early stages. German municipalities, unable to obtain sufficient Reichsbank currency, printed their own Notgeld in enormous quantities from 1918 onward; by 1921 the practice had become semi-normalized, with local magistrates acting as de facto issuers of circulating paper.

Tilsit sits on the Memel River, just across from what became Lithuanian territory after 1919. That geographic pressure — a border town suddenly cut from its eastern hinterland — made functional local currency more urgent here than in most comparable German towns.