5 000 000 Mark

Bad Homburg vor der Höhe — best known as a 19th-century spa resort favored by European royalty — was among the hundreds of German municipalities forced to print their own emergency currency during the hyperinflationary collapse of 1923. By the time this 5,000,000 Mark note was issued, that denomination was already losing ground to inflation by the hour. The Reichsbank had effectively abdicated responsibility for small-denomination liquidity, leaving local authorities to fill the void through whatever printers were available.

C. Naumanns Druckerei in Frankfurt handled the job. The watermarked paper was one of the few concessions to anti-counterfeiting at a moment when the economics of forgery barely made sense.