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5 000 000 Mark
| Issuer | Stadtkasse Erlangen (City Treasury of Erlangen, Bavaria) |
|---|---|
| Year | 1923 |
| Type | Log in to see details |
| Value | Log in to see details |
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| Composition | Log in to see details |
| Size | 188 x 82 mm |
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| Obverse description | Log in to see details |
|---|---|
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| Signature(s) | Dr. Klippel (Oberbürgermeister) and Stadtkämmerer |
| Protection type | Embossed stamp |
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| Comments |
Erlangen's five-million mark note dates from the acute phase of the 1923 hyperinflation, when municipal treasuries across Germany were legally authorized to issue their own emergency currency — Notgeld — to compensate for a chronic shortage of official Reichsbank notes that had been rendered worthless faster than they could be printed. By mid-1923, denominations that would have seemed absurd twelve months earlier were necessary for basic transactions.
The embossed stamp was the city's primary anti-counterfeiting measure, a low-tech but locally controllable solution when sophisticated printing infrastructure wasn't available at short notice. Erlangen's issue carries the countersignatures of the Oberbürgermeister and the city treasurer — a deliberate gesture of municipal accountability in a system that had lost all institutional credibility.
Most high-denomination Notgeld of this period was redeemed and pulped within months of the Rentenmark stabilization in November 1923.