Why were cigarette butts so valuable to people in Berlin at the end of World War II?

Question

I read the following passage on the net: The butt collecting in Berlin, I do not hesitate to say, is the most intensive on earth. Remain stationary on a Berlin street while you smoke a cigarette, and likely as not you will soon have around you a circle of children, able-bodied men, and whiskered old men . . . Butts are legal tender in the economic system that prevails in Berlin. The other afternoon I was at the home of a woman who was having some glass put in the blown-out windows of her apartment. The glazier had been on the job all day . . . The woman's daughter came into the living room to say that the glazier had finished and was waiting to be paid.. 'Come now, where have you put the butts?' the mother asked the child, who went out and shortly returned with a silver bowl containing twenty butts. Her mother took the bowl into the next room, where the glazier had been working, and through the open door I could hear him expressing his ecstatic thanks.

Answer 1

Good for michinoku (answerer 4). The others are guessing or mystified because they are too young to remember.

Also, in those days, most REAL MEN smoked plain cigarettes with no filter tip. Filter tips were for ladies and wimps. There was a LOT more tobacco in a plain butt than there was in a filter butt.

It wasn't just in Berlin. I grew up in Glasgow after the war, and every city in Britain must have been the same. Many of the poor people, out-of-work people, tramps and beggars had got used to smoking in the armed services when cigarettes were plentiful and cheap for them. The only way they could afford to keep smoking was by picking up butts (or "nips"), and rolling their own with the recycled tobacco.

Answer 2

At the end of the Wrold War II, cigarette butts were legal tender in the economic system that prevailed in Berlin.

Cigarettes were very hard for them to get. The cigarette butt thrown on the street would have been picked up. In those times if you were walking along a street smoking, pretty soon you would hear footsteps behind you, and when you threw away your cigarette it would be picked up as a collector's item.

Answer 3

This is going to sound funny, but that's ok.

After WW2, a semigold-peg was used with the Breton-Woods Accords. The dollar was fixed to gold's value and every other currency in the world was fixed to the dollar to prevent a second great depression. In Germany, the deutschmark wasn't a good form of currency, so people used items such as cigarettes and cigarette butts instead as money.

Answer 4

They extracted the remaining tobacco and then rolled it. That's just how hard up they were for smokes.

Answer 5

This is the strangest thing I have heard in a long time...

Answer 6

Because they suck