50 Million Mark - Westfalen Freiherr vom Stein

This piece is one of the Westphalian notgeld issues produced during the catastrophic hyperinflationary collapse of 1923, when the Reichsbank's currency had so thoroughly disintegrated that regional authorities, municipalities, and even private firms were authorized to issue emergency money. The Province of Westphalia chose to invoke Karl vom und zum Stein, the Prussian reformer who had been born at Nassau in 1757 and whose administrative overhaul of the Prussian state after the Napoleonic defeats at Jena and Auerstedt remains one of the more consequential bureaucratic restructurings in German history — a pointed choice for a province asserting its own administrative competence in a moment of central government failure.

By the time this denomination was struck, fifty million marks bought roughly what a single mark had purchased four years earlier.