1 000 000 Mark

Munich's city administration began issuing notgeld in 1923 not from any banking ambition but out of sheer necessity — the Reichsbank could not print fast enough to keep pace with hyperinflation, forcing municipalities across Germany to produce their own emergency currency. The million-mark denomination, unthinkable just months earlier, had become ordinary spending money by mid-1923; a single tram fare or loaf of bread could require notes of this face value.

Stadtgemeinde München was among the larger civic issuers, with tighter oversight than many rural Gemeinden whose notgeld was often purely speculative. The Hitler Putsch of November 1923 — launched and crushed within Munich itself — occurred just as this denomination was circulating, a detail that gives the note an involuntary footnote in the city's political history.