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500 000 000 Mark
| Issuer | Stadt Barmen (City of Barmen) |
|---|---|
| Year | 1923 |
| Type | Log in to see details |
| Value | Log in to see details |
| Currency | Log in to see details |
| Composition | Log in to see details |
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| Printer | August Schmidtmann, Barmen, Germany |
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| Engraver(s) | Log in to see details |
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| Obverse description | Firm plain white paper with a golden-brown letterpress impression; a decorative black border frame encloses the central text block. A circular official seal is applied at the lower centre, and a six-digit serial number is printed in red ink. |
|---|---|
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| Protection description | Sala Ch-S-Muster watermark (Keller #212) |
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| Comments |
Barmen was an industrial city in the Wupper Valley — later absorbed into Wuppertal in 1929 — and like hundreds of German municipalities in late 1923, it was forced to print its own emergency currency as Reichsbank notes became worthless faster than they could be shipped. The half-billion mark denomination places this squarely in the hyperinflationary peak: by November 1923, a single US dollar was worth over four trillion marks, and denominations like this one were already obsolete within days of issue.
August Schmidtmann was a local Barmen printer, not a specialist security firm, which is why the watermark represents the extent of the anti-counterfeiting effort — forgery was economically pointless when the note's value evaporated so quickly.