5 000 000 Mark

Bünde is a small linen-weaving town in the Ravensberger Land, and its municipal administration — like hundreds of German municipalities in 1923 — was forced into the position of emergency currency issuer simply to meet weekly payrolls. The Reichsbank could not physically print or distribute notes fast enough to keep pace with hyperinflation accelerating through the summer and autumn of that year. Local authorities printed their own Notgeld at whatever press was available.

W. Cordes was a local lithographic firm, not a specialist banknote printer. At the 5,000,000 Mark face value, this note was already obsolescent within days of issue — by November 1923 the denomination would have bought almost nothing.