500 000 Mark

Itzehoe's 500,000 Mark notgeld falls squarely into the Weimar hyperinflation emergency issues of mid-1923, when municipal authorities across Germany were forced to print their own circulating currency simply to meet payroll. W. Gente in Hamburg was a regional commercial printer — not a specialist banknote firm — and the notgeld from smaller Schleswig-Holstein towns like Itzehoe often came off the same presses within days of each other, differing only in overprinted text and issuing authority.

The watermarked paper is worth noting: at this denomination, many comparable issues dispensed with security paper entirely. By the time 500,000 Mark felt like a serious sum to protect, it wasn't.