Monschau is a small district in the Eifel region near the Belgian border, and its 1923 million-mark note is a product of the Weimar hyperinflation's most acute phase — the summer and autumn when municipal and district authorities across Germany scrambled to issue Notgeld simply to keep workers paid in denominations that still bought anything. By August 1923, a single note of this face value was worth what the entire prewar German money supply could not cover.
The Merkelbach reference places this in a well-documented but often locally-printed category of district emergency currency. Authentication rests almost entirely on the official seal, which varies in impression quality across surviving examples.
Monschau is a small district in the Eifel region near the Belgian border, and its 1923 million-mark note is a product of the Weimar hyperinflation's most acute phase — the summer and autumn when municipal and district authorities across Germany scrambled to issue Notgeld simply to keep workers paid in denominations that still bought anything. By August 1923, a single note of this face value was worth what the entire prewar German money supply could not cover.
The Merkelbach reference places this in a well-documented but often locally-printed category of district emergency currency. Authentication rests almost entirely on the official seal, which varies in impression quality across surviving examples.