SAARLAND – Federal Germany 100 Franken 1955 VF

The federal state borders France (Grand Est) to the south, Luxembourg to the west and Rhineland-Palatinate to the north and east.

It is named after the Saar River, which is a tributary of the Moselle and flows through the state from south to northwest. Most of the inhabitants live in a conglomeration of cities near the French border, around the capital, Saarbrücken.

This is the case of the Saar (Sarre in French, Saarland in German), a coal region that is now German and, in the past, more than once "forced" under the transalpine tricolor. The Saar, in fact, was a French department already in the Napoleonic era (1798-1814), then a joint Anglo-French protectorate (1920-1935) and, finally, a protectorate under French jurisdiction alone from 1947 to 1957.​