500 Deutsche Mark

The BBk I/Ia series — of which this note is a part — was printed continuously from 1960 through the early 1970s without date change, a deliberate Bundesbank policy meant to discourage hoarding and speculative withdrawal. The 500 Mark denomination was never a note of everyday commerce; German retail banks routinely kept them off the counter, and private citizens rarely encountered them in change. They circulated almost entirely within interbank settlement and large commercial transactions.

Eidenbenz, a Swiss graphic designer trained in Basel, brought a spare typographic discipline to the whole series that was unconventional for high-denomination European currency of the period. The Bundesdruckerei executed the intaglio work, but the aesthetic logic was genuinely his.