500 000 Mark Kreis Arnsberg

Kreis Arnsberg's half-million mark note belongs to the frantic summer of 1923, when German municipal and district authorities were printing emergency currency — Notgeld — faster than the Reichsbank could devalue the underlying mark. The Kreisausschuss, the elected district committee, had legal authority to authorize such issues as a local administrative body, though the economic logic behind any fixed denomination above 100,000 marks had a shelf life measured in weeks.

F. W. Becker was a local Arnsberg printer, not a security printing house. The embossed dry seal substituted for the kind of intaglio or watermark protection a proper banknote would carry — entirely typical for district-level Notgeld of this period, where administrative legitimacy mattered more than counterfeiting deterrence given how quickly the notes became worthless.