5 000 000 Mark Overprinted on 500 Mark

Stralsund's municipal treasury issued this note during the hyperinflationary collapse of 1923, when denominations became obsolete almost as soon as they were printed. The solution — overprinting an existing 500 Mark note with a value ten thousand times higher — was purely practical, driven by the impossibility of keeping local print runs ahead of the currency's daily devaluation.

F. Rackow was a Stralsund-based printer, meaning the overprint was applied locally rather than sourced from one of the large specialist firms handling emergency currency for bigger municipalities. That local provenance makes the physical execution uneven compared to centrally produced Notgeld of the same period.