½ Million Mark

Unna's half-million Mark note arrived in the summer of 1923, when German municipal authorities were scrambling to print emergency money fast enough to keep pace with hyperinflation that was, by then, doubling prices within days. The Magistrat — the town's civic executive body — had legal authority to issue Notgeld, and local printers like Georg Erhard were pressed into service printing denominations that would have been unthinkable eighteen months earlier.

Erhard was a local commercial printer, not a specialist security printer, which shows in the production. The signatures of Krieger and Wollerjan authenticate the issue as municipal obligations rather than central bank instruments — by this point a largely symbolic distinction.