5 000 000 Mark Maximilianshütte

Maximilianshütte was one of Bavaria's major integrated steelworks, operating blast furnaces and rolling mills in Sulzbach-Rosenberg. Like hundreds of German industrial firms in mid-1923, it printed its own emergency currency — Notgeld — to meet payroll when the Reichsbank could not supply sufficient denominations fast enough to keep pace with hyperinflation. Workers needed to be paid in amounts that simply didn't exist as official coinage or low-denomination notes.

The five-million-mark face value places this squarely in the summer-to-autumn 1923 acceleration, when such figures shifted from shocking to routine within weeks.