1 000 000 000 000 Mark

Dirlewang is a village in Swabian Bavaria — tiny, agricultural, and entirely without monetary authority under normal circumstances. The trillion-mark denomination places this note in the final, most delirious phase of the Weimar hyperinflation, autumn 1923, when municipal bodies across Germany were printing Notgeld not as novelties but out of genuine necessity, simply to pay workers and tradesmen in denominations that matched current prices.

The printer, Jakob Niederhuber of Mindelheim, was a local job shop pressed into service as a de facto currency manufacturer. The official stamp substituting for any formal security feature tells you everything about how improvised this system had become.