I copied this from a thread I did a few years ago on another site: The top note is a US printed 100 mark note. The bottom one is a Russian note. Note the missing stylized "F" on the Russian note. Here is a US printed 1 mark note. The "F" is in the same locaton on the half mark, 1 and 5 mark notes. On the 10, 100 and 1000 it is in the upper right corner as shown above. The "F" is for Forbes Lithograph the printer. It is only on the US printed notes. The Russian printed notes do not have the F. The purpose was to leave a way to distinguish the Russian printed notes. The US gave the Russians paper, ink and glass positives of examples of each note in the series. Some sourcces say they were given the "plates". They were not given plates. They were given pictures on glass. Why? The US did not want to give them actual notes so the Russians could not examine samples prior to printing. The F was removed from the notes shown on the glass positives given the Russians so the notes the made did not have the F. The notes in the glass positives were replacements identified by the leading dash in the serial number. The Russians did not know that the dash was intended to identify a replacement so they made all their initial notes notes with a dash and 8 digits in the serial number just like the note on the glass positive. When they reached -99999999, they dumped the dash and went to 9 digits in the number. By this time they had seen that the US notes did not have a dash. They did not have numbering wheels with 9 digits, however so had to use a three digit wheel and a six digit wheel. On these notes, there is a noticeable break between the third and fourth digits and they are often misaligned. In other words, the regular printed Russian notes with 8 digit numbers and the US replacements look exactly the same except for the forbes F. US replacements will have at least one and probably two leading zeroes in the serial number due to the low number printed. The Russians refused to provide information on the number of notes they printed. They printed millions and millions of marks and paid their troops back pay in occupation marks. The Russians freely spent their marks on the blackmarket buying consumer goods from the western allies. The profligate Russian spending and the overdraft it produced (the US troops were sending home more money than the net pay of all US troops in theater so there was an imbalance in the accounts of money in and out of theater) was the primary factor in the introduction of Military Payment Certificates.
Great article -- thanks for reposting! Well, that explains why I found so many dashes on the high-denom AMC. I'll keep my eye out for the secret "F".
