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Comment by asdefghyk | Hacker News Reader

I have a note , written by my grandmother in , aroun 1930, that indicates paper was expensive for her. She was a farmers wife

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During WW2, the Germans started a large operation to print counterfeit 5 pound notes. The intent was to "bomb" them over England to bankrupt the currency.

But the end of the war overtook the operation, and the notes were dumped in the nearby river.

The locals fished the notes out and used them for TP. (The manufacture of TP was a casualty of priority war production.)

"Money of Their Own" by Murray Bloom https://www.amazon.com/Money-Their-Own-Ingenious-Counterfeit...

The BBC made a comedic miniseries about this, I forgot the name. All I remember is one of officers saying "if you don't do this, you'll be shot and then you'll be sorry!"

What is “TP”?

Toilet paper.

The BBC miniseries was called "Private Schultz": https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0081919/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1

Thank you. I checked the library, ebay, and amazon for it - no luck!

That officer will have been Major Neuheim, a blustering and venial SS bureaucrat played with panache by Ian Richardson (not unlike his role as Mr Warrenn in "Brazil"). I'm also puzzled how little-known the series has become, since I remember it fondly.

Then again ... might it have been depression-era conditions affecting her?

PS. This tangentially raises an interesting question: Did the American Depression generally have worldwide economic consequences?

It was a global economic depression, some nations harder hit than others, and only really recovered by nation states shifting to a centrally planned total war economy to kick start unprecedented investment in manufacturing and industry.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Depression#Socio-economi...

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