1 000 000 000 Mark

Lörrach's billion-Mark note dates to the autumn of 1923, when German municipal authorities were legally empowered — and practically obligated — to print their own emergency currency as Reichsbank supply failed to keep pace with hyperinflation. The Wiesentaler Handelsdruckerei was a local commercial printer, not a specialist banknote house; the official stamp functioned as the primary security feature precisely because there was no time or infrastructure for anything more sophisticated.

At the rate inflation was moving in October 1923, a one-billion-Mark denomination had a useful life measured in days before it, too, became inadequate for ordinary transactions.