I've seen that claim too, but I've never seen it substantiated. As described the claim sounded something like the soviet "work credit" system, where Gosplan would centrally decide on the prices for different types of labour, then anyone could use soviet currency to buy labour at that price. The problem with that system is that central planners can never have enough knowledge to accurately set prices. For example, suppose a particular plumber has spent 30 years working on industrial water supply to factories, whereas another plumber just qualified and has only done domestic repairs in apartments. Supposedly their labour is equal, in practice one is significantly more valuable than the other, and the industrial plumber in high demand might not even remember how to braise small domestic pipes. If that situation did occur then factory managers would have to start offering "benefits" to the industrial plumber to attract him to their jobs. Essentially reverting to market based pricing. This did end up happening in the soviet union where jobs with the best perks were in highest demand. For example, air mech positions on some of their jets were highly sought after as they had an ethanol based cooling system and the various roles had a fixed number of "water bottles" assigned to them: They would be allowed to take home a certain amount of alcohol depending on how senior they were. In practice the currency arrangement Hitler inherited was a reasonable strong gold-backed reichmark and a secondary currency system by which the government were printing money for minor public works projects which they promised would be exchangeable for reichmarks. Essentially they were inflating the money supply, but doing it conservatively and in quantities they knew they would probably be able to cover through taxes. Hitler massively expanded the money printing operation to pay for projects like the autobahn system and introduced a semi-secret tertiary currency which worked the same way but was used to fund rearmament. Again, arguably necessary given that germany had been literally invaded and looted by France at the peak of Weimar, but it wasn't some economic "miracle" which had no cost. He was funding his spending by massively reducing the value of the German people's savings, and eventually that would have incurred a hefty bill in the form of a recession. By the end of the inter-war period he was in a position where the NSDAP couldn't afford *not* to go to war. Anyhow, I think that's where the "work based currency" claim comes from, it refers to public works and rearmament projects paying people with reichmark backed scrip.