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GDR banknotes that never came into circulation
Photo:
Sebastian Willnow / dpa
»I will probably never forget these impressive pictures.
Millions of banknotes were stored up to the ceiling,” describes Christine Volk from the Kreditanstalt für Wiederaufbau (KfW) the former treasure cave in the Halberstadt Thekenberge.
The banknotes, which were no longer valid as a means of payment after the introduction of the D-Mark in East Germany on July 1, 1990, were to rot in the underground vaults.
"Most of the paper money looked hot off the press," recalls the KfW spokeswoman.
Hidden from the public, the GDR state bank stored the banknotes underground in 1990/91.
The treasure was walled in and buried.
A report stated that the money in the tunnels would dissolve within a reasonable time frame.
Stolen GDR banknotes are of great value to collectors
However, the hope of an unspectacular disposal of the GDR banknotes in the branched cave system that had been created by concentration camp prisoners during the Nazi era and used for armament purposes was not fulfilled.
In 2001 banknotes appeared on the collectors' market, never issued and hot off the press.
An examination by the KfW – as the legal successor to the state bank of the GDR responsible for the »billion grave« under the mountains of counters – revealed that these banknotes came from Halberstadt and that thieves had illegally gained access to the tunnels through open ventilation shafts.
When two men were caught red-handed by a guard on July 28, 2001, there were a striking number of 200-mark and 500-mark notes among the stolen goods found.
These banknotes, which were printed in East Germany in 1985 but never came into circulation, have a high value for collectors.
The KfW, however, feared further slumps and therefore decided to clear the huge cash deposit quickly.
"We wanted to prevent the Thekenberge from becoming the destination of adventure excursions," said Christine Volk, who oversaw the clearing of the "billion grave" between April and June 2002.
The bills just fluttered around
During those three months, the former means of payment was gradually incinerated in a waste disposal plant near Helmstedt.
Before that, the approximately 3,000 tons of banknotes stored in the tunnel had to be separated from the gravel and sand and loaded into containers.
While ten employees from Schachtbau Nordhausen carried out this work, security guards from a Wernigerode company made sure that the last note went into the containers provided.
Up until the end of June 2002, six container vehicles transported a total of 620 million banknotes almost every day through the Harz mountains to Buschhaus in Lower Saxony.
The gray 33 cubic meter containers were stuffed with banknotes.
Dangers were driven in the evening hours, as few people as possible should know about the disposal operation.
In the Buschhaus waste disposal plant (TRV), the terminus for the disused paper money, some employees are said to have initially wondered about the rain of money that regularly poured into the huge garbage bunker around 8 p.m.
"It was a bit like Uncle Dagobert, Walt Disney's super-rich duck, when the containers were unloaded and the bills, some of which were in good condition, just fluttered around," said TRV spokesman Markus Nitschke at the time.
These banknotes were shredded immediately after unloading and mixed with other residual waste.
At 1200 degrees in the boiler, the money that had been means of payment for around 17 million people between the Baltic Sea and the Thuringian Forest for more than 40 years burned up almost completely.
The slag that was created from the mixture of household waste and banknotes was used as a substitute for gravel in road construction, and the entrance to the former treasure cave was soon bricked up.
Incidentally, a small part of the Halberstadt treasure is still open to the public, said Tanja Chatzinotas from the Leipzig Contemporary History Forum.
KfW provided a few bundles of banknotes for its permanent exhibition.
A display case presents a collection of GDR banknotes, including banknotes that had previously been stored in the mountains of counters
czl/dpa
