POLAND. Litzmannstadt (Lodz) Ghetto. 50 Pfennig 15 May 1940 (Feller PO-560a.), WPG graded: 58. Almost UNC.


In the early 1940s, the Łódź Ghetto was turned into a tightly controlled industrial zone supplying the German war effort. The Nazis appointed a Jewish administration under Mordechai Chaim Rumkowski to maintain order and keep production moving. That same year, special banknotes were issued in the name of the 'Jewish Elders of Litzmannstadt,' the imposed German name for Łódź, and became the ghetto’s only legal currency. Because money circulated so rapidly, the notes wore out quickly. They had to be repeatedly reprinted, and when suitable paper ran out, even previously withdrawn, damaged notes were put back into use. As a result, beginning in 1942, paper money was replaced by coinage (see Lot 3680).

Even these modest pieces of currency endure as quiet testimony to a system built on deprivation - and to the profound human suffering imposed on those trapped within the ghetto.