100 000 Mark

Hamborn was an independent industrial city in the Ruhr when this note was issued — it would not be absorbed into the newly created city of Duisburg until 1929. Like most municipal emergency currency of the 1922 hyperinflation spiral, this Notgeld issue was a practical stopgap: the Reichsbank simply could not print and distribute denominations fast enough to keep pace with collapsing purchasing power, forcing cities, towns, and even individual firms to fill the void themselves.

Thyssendruck was the in-house printing operation of the Thyssen steel concern, one of the dominant industrial employers in Hamborn. The city and the company were effectively inseparable — the workforce, the housing, the infrastructure.