BERLIN (dpa) – Banknotes are piled up in bundles, a mountain of money there for the taking, but only printing-plant workers can get their hands on it.
Everyone else can only watch the money-printing machinery in Berlin via the government printing office’s homepage in the Internet. No outsiders are allowed to witness firsthand what the printing presses are producing.
At the second big printer of euro notes in Germany, the Munich-based company Giesecke & Devrient (D&G), “top secret” is also the order of the day.
Since mid-1999, both companies have printed more than 4.3 billion euro notes under the strictest security. The money, with a face value of 265 billion euros (235 billion dollars), is meant to cover Germany’s initial needs for the new currency.
To ensure that counterfeiters won’t have any chance in the initial phase of the conversion to the euro at the outset of 2002, none of the banknotes will be issued to the public ahead of time. Even the design details are to remain a secret.
Employees of the money-printing plants are obliged to maintain the strictest confidentiality about the new money.
Potential criminals could misuse the information,” says a spokeswoman for Germany’s Bundesbank in Frankfurt.
Only in September, when commercial banks will be provided with their first deliveries of the new money in what is being called “frontloading”, will the circle of “people in the know” be widened.
Already, stacks and stacks of the new bills are being stored in bank vaults. The freshly printed notes are transported from the federal German state banks to storage depots at regular intervals.
Naturally, nobody is to find out where these are located,” says Anton Hoerhage, spokesman for the State Bank of Bavaria.
Consumers are to be informed through an extensive advertising campaign about the new money before the euros go into circulation on January 1, 2002.
This of course will also deal with the exact appearance of the notes and coins,” says the Bundesbank spokeswoman. This late campaign will ensure that counterfeiters cannot take advantage of any initial uncertainty which people might have about the brand-new money.
The deutschmark is headed for the dustbin of history. At G&D, the last printing run of the 10-mark note took place on January 20, 2000. Since then, the printing machines have been re-geared for the euro.
In mid-2000 the first controversy erupted when problems were found in 100-euro notes being printed by the Munich company. Due to a misprint on the back of the notes, more than 300 million of the new notes had to be destroyed.
G&D boss Willi Berchthold stresses that this was a one-off problem, one that will not endanger the punctual introduction of the euro.
Giesecke & Devrient will be producing half of all the euro notes printed in Germany for initial use. The other half is being produced by the privatized Federal Printing Office in Berlin.
Altogether, the 12 single currency eurozone members are printing more than 14 billion euro notes. The Federal Printing Office says that if they were laid end to end, they would stretch to the moon and back.
