20 000 000 Mark

Montabaur's municipal administration issued this note during the catastrophic hyperinflation of 1923, when Reichsbank currency was depreciating so rapidly that local authorities across Germany were authorized — and often compelled — to print their own emergency money, the so-called Notgeld, simply to meet payroll and keep commerce moving. A 20-million-Mark denomination, unthinkable even two years earlier, was by mid-1923 worth a loaf of bread at best.

The signatures of Gehring and Saul authenticate it as a Magistrat-issued instrument, distinguishing these municipal obligations from the private commercial Notgeld flooding the same market simultaneously.