Marienburg — now Malbork, Poland — was the seat of the Teutonic Knights' Grand Masters and, by the First World War, a mid-sized Prussian administrative town with no particular monetary weight. Its Notgeld issues emerged from the same wartime small-change shortage that forced hundreds of German municipalities to print their own emergency pfennig notes after 1914, when hoarding stripped coins from circulation almost overnight.
The watermarked paper on this issue is worth noting — many municipal Notgeld series of this period used plain stock, so the presence of a security feature suggests this particular run was produced with more care than most town-level emergency scrip.
Marienburg — now Malbork, Poland — was the seat of the Teutonic Knights' Grand Masters and, by the First World War, a mid-sized Prussian administrative town with no particular monetary weight. Its Notgeld issues emerged from the same wartime small-change shortage that forced hundreds of German municipalities to print their own emergency pfennig notes after 1914, when hoarding stripped coins from circulation almost overnight.
The watermarked paper on this issue is worth noting — many municipal Notgeld series of this period used plain stock, so the presence of a security feature suggests this particular run was produced with more care than most town-level emergency scrip.