5 Groszy Warsaw Ghetto

The Łódź Ghetto scrip is better known, but Warsaw's internal currency is rarer and far more historically loaded. The Judenrat issued these notes for internal ghetto commerce — a closed monetary system designed by the German administration to extract economic control while maintaining the fiction of a self-governing community. By 1943, the Warsaw Ghetto had already been reduced catastrophically by the Treblinka deportations of the previous summer; this denomination was issued into a population that had fallen from roughly 400,000 to under 40,000.

The Ghetto Uprising began in April 1943. Very few of these notes survived the liquidation and the systematic burning of the ghetto that followed.