10 000 000 000 Mark

Passau's city council issued this 10-billion Mark note at the absolute peak of Weimar hyperinflation — by November 1923, notes of this denomination were already obsolescent within days of printing. G. Kanzler was a local Passau printer, and like hundreds of municipal emergency issuers across Bavaria that autumn, the Stadtrat had no choice but to commission whatever press was available locally. The Reichsbank simply could not supply currency fast enough.

Notgeld of this magnitude is sometimes dismissed as a curiosity, but these municipal billions were genuine legal tender, used for actual transactions before the Rentenmark stabilization ended the crisis in late November 1923.