500 000 Mark

Wiesdorf was a small industrial municipality on the Rhine, best known as the home of Bayer's main chemical works. By 1923, German cities and towns were issuing their own emergency currency — Notgeld — not as novelties but out of necessity, as the Reichsbank simply could not print and distribute enough physical notes to keep pace with hyperinflation accelerating weekly. A 500,000 Mark denomination, unthinkable two years earlier, was routine by mid-1923 and nearly worthless by autumn.

M. DuMont Schauberg in Köln was a well-established commercial printer that handled Notgeld for numerous Rhineland municipalities during this period, which kept production quality reasonably consistent even under chaotic economic conditions. Wiesdorf itself was absorbed into the newly created city of Leverkusen in 1930.