Inspired by @Taxidermist post in another thread I was inspired to share some German occupation of Ukraine notes from 1942: The fascists horde from Germany invaded Ukraine from the west on 22 June 1941, the fascists from Germany decided to make Ukraine their colonial possession and ethnically cleanse the place of "untermenschen" or any other than Aryans. They even issued paper money, of which most of the legend was in German, despite the fact that most people in Ukraine didn't even read Ukrainian or Russian, let alone German. They put an attractive, but noticeably blonde Aryan appearing girl on the note. This note has a stirringly mysterious vignette of a peasant with bundled sheaves of wheat in the background, rather haunting and ironic in effect. In reality the Germans managed to pillage most of the grain grown in Ukraine during their occupation and very little actually went to the local population. When the Germans overran Ukraine they imposed a whole new monetary system on the country, the USSR rubles were removed from circulation at a rate of 1:1 vs the karbovanets denominated currency that they issued. The karbovanets was valued at 10:1 to the German Reichsmark. Curiously, but tellingly the Germans issued this currency with only a small amount of Ukrainian language text - on the bottom reverse of the note - in effect letting the Ukrainians know where they stood in the situation. The first notes prepared had all of the text in Ukrainian, but they were rejected by the German run "Central Emission Bank". One wonders why they even bothered denominating the currency in a name familiar to Ukrainians, they might just as well as referred to the new currency as marks given the presence of mostly German language on the notes.
Not that the occupation administration would have cared much about local customs, but since the karbovanets was used in Ukraine for a while after the end of the Tsarist regime, I guess they wanted to pick something that was different from the Soviet/Russian ruble and different from the Reichsmark. And apparently the use of the name "karbovanets" in the 1940s did not render it impossible: It was used again on those short lived Ukrainian 1991 kupons ... Christian
Every time Karbovanets has been used as currency bad things happen... 1918, 1942, 1992. Friends and family have described them as a sort of Mickey Mouse money. Not that current hryvnia currency is fair too much better these days. The notes do not bear a printer's imprint, in some places like Croatia and Bulgaria Giesecke and Devrient got the printing contract, but I wonder if these were printed at the Reichsbank?
Maybe Nazis wanted it to appear as some sort if independence, different from Soviet regime. Many did not like the communist reign and karbovanets, which possibly reminded for some the karbovanets issues of Ukrainian Republic in 1918-1919, shortly after the revolution, just before they became a part of USSR.
Not quite, the Reichsdruckerei made them from what I have (just) read. I do not collect paper money, so bear with me here, but the German Wikipedia says so. Well, other sources (this page in Russian or this thread in German for example) provide the same information ... Christian
Using German pfennig coins along with Soviet Rubles and Karbovanets notes must have made for a real mess in accounting. There are some monetary references in the novel "Babi Yar" by Anatoly Kuznetsov - but really more about the "svinichki" or piggy coins ie Nicholas II gold coins that he received in payment for slaughtering farm animals and not much reference to the occupation currency.
These would be better identified as puppet bank notes than occupation notes. These were issued by the German puppet government in Ukraine and used by the general population. The German military forces used Reichkredkassenschein as occupation currency in Ukraine.
The definition of a "puppet" government is one that has local, ie in the case of the Philippines during WWII was ruled by Jose P. Laurel, a Filipino, but was essentially a Japanese puppet leader. There was NO localized government in Reichskommisariat Ukraine and Ukraine was led by Erich Koch, a former gauleiter from E. Prussia.
