1 000 000 000 000 Mark

Mengen is a small town in Upper Swabia — population a few thousand in the 1920s — which makes a locally issued one-trillion-mark note one of the more surreal artifacts of the German hyperinflation. By late 1923, municipal and district authorities across Germany were printing their own emergency currency because the Reichsbank simply could not produce denominations large enough fast enough. These Notgeld issues often had validity periods of days, sometimes hours, before the figures became economically useless.

The Stadtgemeinde Mengen's trillion-mark note was not an act of ambition. It was administrative necessity at the outer edge of a collapsing monetary system — issued just weeks before the Rentenmark stabilization of November 1923 rendered every one of these instruments worthless.