1 000 000 Mark

Helmbrechts was a small textile-manufacturing town in Upper Franconia, and its city treasury joined hundreds of German municipal bodies in 1923 by issuing emergency inflation currency — Notgeld — as the Reichsmark collapsed beyond any practical use. By August of that year, a million marks was barely enough to buy a newspaper, which makes the denomination here less dramatic than it appears.

W. Saalfrank was a local printer, almost certainly working under considerable pressure and with limited materials. The official stamp substitutes for more sophisticated security — common practice for small-municipality issues where the cost and logistics of engraved printing made no economic sense given the note's likely lifespan of days or weeks.