1 000 000 Mark

Crefeld — now spelled Krefeld — was a textile manufacturing hub in the Rhineland, and its municipal emergency money (Notgeld) from 1923 reflects the administrative scramble of the hyperinflation peak. By mid-1923, the Reichsbank could not produce currency fast enough to meet demand, so cities and towns issued their own millions and billions under emergency authority. Worms & Lüthgen, a local printing firm, handled this note in-house — which kept turnaround fast but meant quality control was secondary to output volume.

The million-mark denomination, staggering in name, represented a fraction of a day's purchasing power by the time most of these notes reached circulation.