20 000 000 Mark

Duisburg's hyperinflation notgeld sits at a peculiar intersection of municipal desperation and logistical improvisation. By mid-1923, the Reichsbank could not supply denominations fast enough to keep pace with collapsing purchasing power, so hundreds of German cities and towns became de facto currency issuers — legally, under emergency provisions that the central government had neither the capacity nor the political will to enforce uniformly.

The watermarked paper is notable: many municipal issues at this denomination simply used whatever stock was available, watermark or not. That Duisburg sourced security paper suggests either existing supplier relationships or a deliberate, if short-lived, attempt at anti-counterfeiting discipline in a monetary environment where the notes would be obsolete within weeks anyway.