500 000 Mark

Pirmasens was a shoe-manufacturing town in the Rhineland-Palatinate, and by mid-1923 it was printing its own emergency currency like hundreds of other German municipalities scrambling to keep wages moving faster than the hyperinflationary collapse. The Bürgermeisteramt — the mayor's office, not a bank — acted as issuing authority, which was entirely legal under the emergency framework Weimar authorities had effectively stopped controlling.

The 500,000 Mark denomination places this note in the summer of 1923 acceleration, before the October–November peak when denominations jumped into the billions and trillions. Notgeld at this level was often redeemed within days of issue, its purchasing power already eroded by the time workers spent it.