What is the equivalent buying power of one 1945 Reichsmark in 2016 Euros?
score:9
That's actually a more complicated question than it may seem. During WWII the Nazi government instituted price controls on things like bread, and the occupying UN powers didn't lift those controls until 1948. So bread's official price and its real ("black-market") price would have been very different things [pdf].
From 1936 through 1944, money (measured by currency in circulation plus total bank deposits) rose somewhat more than sixfold (Table 2). Despite this rise in money, price controls restrained the rise in the official consumer price index to only 14 percent from 1936 through 1944. Germany therefore ended the war with suppressed inflation. The Allies kept Hitler’s price freeze in effect during the postwar occupation. Goods traded on the black market or through barter because no one wanted to exchange goods for marks at the artificially low price level.
Fortunately for our purposes, this paper goes directly into the implications of this with respect to bread:
Germans used nylon stockings, American cigarettes, and Parker pens for currency. For example, in 1945, ten cigarettes could be exchanged for 1,500 grams of bread and two pairs of stockings for 1.5 pounds of butter (Haus der Geschichte).
(The reference to Haus der Geschichte is to the exhibits in the museum of modern German history in Bonn, so presumably this is for West Germany only)
So what this tells us is that, unless you had a ration card for it and a bit of luck, you couldn't get bread for Marks before it sold out. You'd have to buy it from the black market (think of it as "bread scalpers"). Assuming a loaf weighs about 250 grams, the going price was about 1 and 1/3 cigarettes for a loaf.
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Source: stackoverflow.com
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