100 000 Mark Krupp

Krupp's privately issued emergency currency from the hyperinflation peak is among the more industrially significant of all German notgeld. Fried. Krupp AG was not a municipal authority scrambling to cover a coin shortage — it was one of the largest industrial employers in Europe, and its Essen works had tens of thousands of wage laborers who needed to be paid in something that held purchasing power long enough to reach a shop. These notes functioned essentially as payroll instruments, circulating within the company's immediate economic orbit.

The guilloche underprint was the primary deterrent against counterfeiting — meaningful in a period when forgery of inflated notes was endemic and prosecutions nearly impossible to sustain.