5 000 000 Mark

Wattenscheid's five-million-mark note belongs to the most chaotic phase of Weimar hyperinflation — by mid-1923, municipal and regional authorities across Germany were printing their own emergency currency, Notgeld, because Reichsbank notes were being rendered worthless faster than they could be shipped. Cities like Wattenscheid had no practical choice but to issue local denominations to keep commerce moving at all, even knowing those notes might be obsolete within weeks.

The Ruhr occupation by French and Belgian forces beginning in January 1923 hit industrial towns in the region particularly hard, and Wattenscheid — a coal-mining municipality between Bochum and Gelsenkirchen — was squarely in that zone. Passive resistance, supply disruption, and economic paralysis accelerated the local need for supplementary currency well beyond what even Berlin anticipated.

By November 1923, the Rentenmark reform made virtually all such municipal issues worthless overnight.