1 000 000 000 Mark

Cologne's municipal administration issued this one billion mark note during the hyperinflationary collapse of autumn 1923, when German cities and towns were legally permitted — and practically compelled — to produce their own emergency currency, known as Notgeld, to meet basic payroll and commercial demands. The Reichsbank simply could not supply denominations fast enough as prices doubled by the day.

The Kölner Verlags-Anstalt und Druckerei was a local commercial printer pressed into monetary service. At the height of the crisis, a single loaf of bread in Germany cost hundreds of millions of marks, which gives this billion-mark denomination a grim sense of the velocity at which purchasing power was being destroyed.