5 Dollars Lethbridge; PoW Camp

Camp 133 at Lethbridge was the largest prisoner-of-war camp in Canada during the Second World War, holding German prisoners — overwhelmingly Afrika Korps veterans — in numbers that at peak exceeded 12,000 men. The internal scrip issued there was a practical necessity: Geneva Convention obligations required that working prisoners be compensated, but Canadian authorities were not about to let enemy nationals handle real currency. Bulman Brothers of Winnipeg, a commercial print house better known for farm supply catalogues and trade ephemera, produced the series.

The $5 denomination was the highest in the camp series, and high-value scrip at Lethbridge is meaningfully harder to find than the lower denominations — prisoners had less occasion to spend it and more reason to save or conceal it.