5 000 000 Mark Rheinisches Braunkohlen-Syndikat

The Rheinisches Braunkohlen-Syndikat was the cartel controlling Rhenish brown coal — lignite — production, and like hundreds of German industrial concerns in the hyperinflation of 1923, it issued its own emergency currency (Notgeld) to pay workers when the Reichsbank simply could not supply enough printed marks fast enough. A 5-million-mark denomination would have seemed extraordinary even a year earlier; by mid-1923 it barely covered a day's wages.

M. Dumont Schauberg was a Cologne newspaper and commercial printing house, pressed into banknote production by necessity rather than expertise. The same presses turning out the Kölnische Zeitung were producing corporate scrip.