50 Pfennig Wiesa; Officer PoW Camp

Wiesa, a small village near Annaberg in Saxony, housed one of the many officer prisoner-of-war camps Germany operated under the 1907 Hague Convention framework, which required detaining powers to provide officers with pay commensurate with their rank. That obligation created a practical problem: German currency could not be permitted to circulate freely among prisoners who might use it to fund escapes. Camp-specific Lagergeld was the administrative solution — a closed scrip redeemable only within the wire.

Johannes Pässler of Dresden printed this note, a firm that handled a number of such Saxon camp issues in 1916. The Camb#3601 reference places it within a reasonably well-documented but physically scarce series; officer camps held far fewer men than enlisted camps, meaning print runs were correspondingly small.