10 Rupien

By 1916, the colonial banking infrastructure of German East Africa had been completely severed from Europe. With no possibility of importing printed currency, the Deutsch-Ostafrikanische Zeitung — a newspaper press in Dar es Salaam — was pressed into service producing emergency money. The results were predictably crude: typography-heavy layouts, thin local paper stock, and hand-applied signatures from whatever officials remained available as the British naval blockade tightened.

Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck's guerrilla campaign kept German forces in the field until after the Armistice, and these notes circulated accordingly — deep into territory, long after most colonial currencies had collapsed. Surviving examples frequently show heavy wear and improvised handling, which is simply what use under those conditions looked like.