5 000 000 Mark

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.