500 000 Mark

Eisenach issued this note under the Notgeld system at the height of the 1923 hyperinflation, when municipal authorities across Germany were legally permitted — indeed compelled by circumstance — to print their own emergency currency to keep local wages and commerce moving. Gebrüder Engelhardt, a printing firm based in Eisenach itself, produced the note locally, which was common for smaller cities that could not wait on overstretched national printers.

The half-million Mark denomination, staggering by any peacetime measure, was already losing value faster than it could be spent by the time notes like this reached circulation in mid-1923. Stabilization came in November with the introduction of the Rentenmark, after which virtually all Notgeld was withdrawn and destroyed — making surviving examples disproportionately scarce relative to the quantities originally printed.