Do you have some links I could read up on, or was this just the set up to a poor joke?

Absolutely not a joke... http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/Holocaust/money....

If you are interested/live in NYC there is a library with a ton of research materials on currencies/ history from all over the world at the American Numismatic Society's library: http://numismatics.org/Library/Library