500 000 Mark

Erfurt's municipal emergency currency program ran well behind the hyperinflation curve by mid-1923 — the Reichsbank was printing faster than any local authority could authorize and distribute. A 500,000 Mark note, enormous in nominal terms just months earlier, was functionally small change by late summer. The Erfurter Druckerei und Plakatzentrale was a poster and commercial print house, not a security printer, and the guilloche underprint here is relatively crude by banknote standards.

Notgeld of this denomination was typically valid for only a matter of weeks before reissue at higher figures made it obsolete.