5 000 000 Mark

The Landkreis Gladbach — the rural district surrounding the city of Mönchengladbach, distinct from the city's own municipal administration — issued this note at the height of the Rhineland hyperinflation in 1923, when the Reichsbank's supply of emergency currency consistently lagged behind the collapsing purchasing power of each successive denomination. Five million marks, an incomprehensible figure before that year, had become routine spending money by late summer.

B. Kühlen was a local Mönchengladbach printer, not a specialist currency house — exactly the kind of firm conscripted into notgeld production when demand outstripped the capacity of established security printers. The district's Kreisausschuss, its elected executive committee, held the issuing authority rather than the city itself.