20 Mark Łódź Ghetto

The Łódź Ghetto scrip was not issued by a bank or an occupying authority in any conventional sense. Hans Biebow, the German administrator overseeing the ghetto's economic operation, forced the Judenrat to issue this currency under the name of Mordechai Chaim Rumkowski — "Der Älteste der Juden," the Elder of the Jews — as a mechanism to strip incoming deportees of Reich marks and foreign currency upon arrival, exchanged compulsorily at rates set by the Germans.

The paper and printing were sourced locally within Łódź itself, making this among the very few occupation scrip issues produced inside a ghetto rather than imported from an external printer. The watermark is notable precisely because of that origin — not a security feature in any functional monetary sense, but a detail that reflects the ghetto's surprisingly capable printing infrastructure, which Rumkowski had cultivated to support the ghetto's internal administrative machinery.

This scrip was declared worthless upon liquidation in 1944.