5 000 000 Mark

Crimmitschau, a textile manufacturing town in Saxony, issued this note during the hyperinflation peak of 1923, when municipal and commercial authorities across Germany were printing their own emergency currency — Notgeld — to meet payroll when Reichsbank notes simply couldn't be physically produced fast enough to keep pace with collapsing purchasing power. A five-million-mark denomination that would have been unimaginable two years earlier was, by mid-1923, barely enough for a loaf of bread.

Crimmitschau had its own particular labor history — the city's textile workers staged one of the longest strikes in German industrial history in 1903–04 — though by 1923 the concern was survival, not solidarity.