1 Rupie

By 1915, the naval blockade had severed German East Africa from virtually all outside supply. Governor Heinrich Schnee's administration could no longer import printed currency, so emergency notes were produced locally by the Deutsch-Ostafrikanische Zeitung — a newspaper printing house in Dar es Salaam, not a security printer. The results show it: typographic design, thin commercial stock, and none of the intaglio work that would normally characterize colonial currency.

Lettow-Vorbeck's guerrilla campaign kept the colony fighting until two weeks after the Armistice in Europe, making these notes among the last circulating paper of any German colonial territory. Schnee himself signed the instruments of surrender on 25 November 1918.