1 000 000 Mark

Neheim is a small industrial town in Westphalia — today part of Arnsberg — and like hundreds of German municipalities in 1923, it was forced to print its own emergency currency when hyperinflation rendered Reichsbank notes obsolete faster than they could be distributed. This is Notgeld in its most extreme register: the million-mark denomination that would have seemed unthinkable even eighteen months earlier.

The official stamp is the only security feature, which tells you everything about the period. By mid-1923, counterfeiting local scrip was barely worth the effort.