1 000 000 Mark Barmer Bank-Verein

One of dozens of private Notgeld issues that flooded the Rhineland during the hyperinflationary peak of 1923, when the Reichsbank simply could not produce denominations fast enough to keep pace with collapsing purchasing power. Barmer Bank-Verein was a legitimate regional commercial bank in Barmen — later absorbed into Wuppertal — and its emergency issues were authorized under the same desperate framework that briefly turned every sizable German institution into a currency printer.

The guilloche underprint was the bank's minimal concession to anti-counterfeiting; at a million marks per note, forgery was almost economically pointless by the time these circulated.