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50 000 000 Mark
| Issuer | Stadt Altenburg (City of Altenburg), Thuringia |
|---|---|
| Year | 1923 |
| Type | Log in to see details |
| Value | Log in to see details |
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| Composition | Log in to see details |
| Size | 150 × 85 mm |
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| Printer | Log in to see details |
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| Obverse description | Green and brown Notgeld note with a dense guilloche underprint across the face, the large numeral '50' and the denomination 'MILLIONEN MARK' printed in bold dark letterpress at centre. A line-engraved vignette of the Altenburg town hall tower occupies the right margin. Two manuscript signatures appear below the issuing text, flanked by the printed titles 'Der Stadtrat' and 'Der Stadtdirektor', with a circular Land Thüringen official seal applied in brown at centre. A cautionary anti-counterfeiting legal text runs along the lower margin in small Gothic script. |
|---|---|
| Obverse lettering | Log in to see details |
| Reverse description | The reverse is essentially unprinted, presenting the blank paper surface through which the obverse design shows as a ghosted impression. The show-through of the town hall vignette, denomination text, and official seal are clearly visible as mirror images, confirming the single-sided letterpress production method typical of inflationary Notgeld issues. |
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| Comments |
Altenburg's Spielkartenfabrik — better known internationally as the playing card manufacturer that produced Skat decks — pivoted to emergency currency printing during the hyperinflation peak of 1923, as scores of German municipalities scrambled to commission notes locally rather than wait on an overwhelmed Reichsdruckerei. The firm had the presses, the paper stock, and the ink; the denomination reflects where Germany was by late 1923, when fifty million marks was roughly the cost of a streetcar ticket.
Notgeld of this magnitude is common as a category but genuinely specific as an artifact — each issuing city tells you something about local industrial capacity in a crisis.