5 000 000 Mark Hugo Stinnes Linien

Hugo Stinnes Linien was one of the largest private shipping and industrial conglomerates in Weimar Germany, and during the hyperinflation of 1923 it was legally permitted — along with hundreds of other companies, municipalities, and regional authorities — to issue its own emergency currency, or Notgeld, to pay workers when Reichsbank notes were arriving too slowly and depreciating too fast to be useful. This note is one of those corporate payroll instruments, denominated at five million marks at a moment when that sum bought less each week than it had the week before.

The Hamburg printing origin is consistent with Stinnes's major operational base in the city's port district. The watermark security feature is modest but not negligible for private emergency issue.