5 Millionen Mark, Phoenix AG, Düsseldorf, 1923

By the summer of 1923 the mark was dying. Hyperinflation had reached the point where prices doubled within hours, and the Reichsbank could not print cash fast enough to cover a single payday. Large employers were allowed to issue their own high-denomination emergency money - Großnotgeld - to pay their workforces, redeemable against the firm's own account. For the great industrial companies of the Rhine and Ruhr this was not a collector's novelty but a daily necessity: without it they could not put wages in their workers' hands.

The Phoenix Aktien-Gesellschaft für Bergbau und Hüttenbetrieb (Phoenix Company for Mining and Metallurgy) was one of the giants of Ruhr heavy industry - a mining and steel conglomerate with works around Hörde, Dortmund and Düsseldorf. By 1923 its commercial centre lay in Düsseldorf, from where this note was issued; in 1926 the firm was folded into the newly formed Vereinigte Stahlwerke (United Steel Works), the largest steel combine in Europe.

This 5-million-Mark note is dated 15 August 1923 and marked "Reihe 2" (Series 2). It is a plain, business-like piece: a green-and-black guilloche face reading "Phoenix / Fünf Millionen Mark" with the serial number, and an essentially blank reverse - no legends, no local scenery, nothing of the artistry of the 1921 collector notes. It was printed by L. Schwann of Düsseldorf. Within a few weeks the sum it names, five million marks, would barely buy bread.