1 000 000 Mark

Calw's million-mark note dates from the summer of 1923, when German municipal authorities were legally permitted — and practically forced — to issue their own emergency currency as the Reichsbank's output failed to keep pace with hyperinflation. Stadtgemeinde Calw, a small Black Forest town best known later as Hermann Hesse's birthplace, was among hundreds of municipalities that contracted local printers for notgeld at denominations that would have been unthinkable eighteen months earlier.

The watermarked paper distinguishes this from the cheapest municipal issues of the period, suggesting a degree of anti-counterfeiting effort even as the note's face value was collapsing daily. By November 1923, one million marks bought almost nothing.