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1 000 000 000 Mark
| Issuer | Stadt- und Landkreis Aachen |
|---|---|
| Year | 1923 |
| Type | Local banknote |
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| Obverse description | The obverse is printed in brown and black on plain paper, with an ornate floral and geometric guilloche border framing the entire note. The issuer's name 'Stadt- und Landkreis Aachen' appears in bold letterpress at the top, below which the denomination 'Eine Milliarde Mark' is set in large Gothic script, with 'Gutschein über' above it in smaller text. The date 'Aachen, den 12. Oktober 1923' is printed centrally below a block of legal text, flanked by two circular official seals of the Stadt- und Landkreis Aachen, with two manuscript signatures below the printed titles of the signatories; a red overprint panel on the left margin reads the validity notice for the Regierungsbezirk Aachen. |
|---|---|
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| Reverse description | The reverse is printed in warm brown tones and carries the same ornate floral and geometric guilloche border as the obverse. The central design consists of a large oval vignette containing a finely engraved landscape view of a domed building or pavilion set among trees, rendered in a delicate intaglio-style underprint. Acanthus-scroll corner ornaments accent the transition between the border and the central vignette, and the denomination text from the obverse shows through as a faint mirror image due to the thin paper stock. |
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| Comments |
By late 1923, German municipal authorities had been empowered — out of sheer necessity — to issue their own emergency currency, the Notgeld, as the Reichsbank could not print fast enough to keep pace with hyperinflation. Aachen's Stadt- und Landkreis was among hundreds of such bodies flooding the country with locally denominated paper. A billion marks on a single note was not an abstraction; in October 1923, it barely covered a loaf of bread.
Printed locally in Aachen, this note belongs to the final, most extreme phase of the inflation series — denominations that would have been unimaginable even six months earlier.