1 000 000 000 Mark

By August 1923, the German hyperinflation had so thoroughly destroyed purchasing power that municipal governments were printing their own emergency currency — Notgeld — simply to make payroll. Solingen, then as now a center of the German cutlery and blade industry, issued this one-billion Mark note through a local commercial printer rather than any financial institution. The Reichsbank had effectively lost control of the money supply months earlier.

Kunstanstalt Hermann Rabitz was a Solingen-based printing and graphics firm, not a security printer. That a city turned to a commercial art house for billion-mark denominations captures the administrative desperation of that autumn more precisely than any inflation statistic.