1 000 000 Marks

Bad Ems was better known in 1923 as a fashionable Rhine spa town than as an emergency currency issuer, but the hyperinflationary collapse of the Reichsmark forced even minor municipalities to print their own notgeld to meet payroll and local commerce. By August 1923, when million-mark denominations became necessary for everyday transactions, the Stadtkasse was issuing paper that would have been unimaginable a year earlier.

The DeNG reference places this within the documented Großgeldschein series — the large-denomination emergency notes catalogued by district. Survival rates for these provincial hyperinflation pieces vary sharply; many were redeemed quickly and pulped, while others were kept as curiosities almost immediately, since even contemporary Germans recognized they were living through something historically grotesque.