Treasure Containing Billions of Weimar Republic Marks Found in Russia

A group of volunteers from the innovation company “Technopolis GS” found a metal box with banknotes from the era of the Weimar Republic to the nominal value of 10 billion marks during excavations the Kaliningrad Region.

The treasure was found during the excavations of one of the military graves of the First World War.

“In the box there was a handwritten letter partially affected by moisture. Inside was a letter dedicated to a soldier, several German and East Prussian patriotic newspapers, there was also a set of banknotes and coins of 50 pfennig to 10 billion German marks from the era of Weimar Republic,” the press secretary of the company reported.

The curator of the volunteer group Valeriy Gusarov said that a special interest lies with the discovered letter, which may contain interesting details about life in East Prussia during the First World War.

The bourgeois-democratic Weimar Republic (1919-1933) was established in Germany after the November Revolution of 1918. In the early period of its existence it experienced hyperinflation, when within four months the cost of a paper mark fell by 382,000 times.

The territory of former East Prussia, which today forms the Kaliningrad region, is the only place in Russia where fighting took place from 1914-1918. The region contains about one thousand World War I era military burials.