5 Mark Darlehenskassenschein

The Darlehenskassenscheine were emergency loan treasury notes, not Reichsbank issues — a legal distinction that mattered enormously in 1914. Germany's gold standard obligations made direct money-printing politically and legally fraught at the war's outbreak, so the government established Darlehenskassen (loan offices) that could issue notes against collateral, technically keeping them off the central bank's balance sheet. The fiction dissolved quickly, but the institutional separation was real enough at issue.

With just over twelve million printed, the 1914 5 Mark is among the more available of the wartime Darlehenskassenscheine — though paper quality on the series degrades noticeably with heavy use, and examples with intact microprint legibility are harder to find than the population figure suggests.