10 000 000 000 Mark

Kaiserslautern's municipal emergency money belongs to the extreme end of the German hyperinflation series — by late 1923, even city governments were authorized to issue their own notes simply because the Reichsbank could not print fast enough to keep pace with collapsing purchasing power. A 10-billion-Mark denomination from a mid-sized Palatinate city is unremarkable by the standards of that autumn; notes of this face value were being spent on bread within days of issue.

The Palatinate was under French occupation at the time, a complication that made local Notgeld politically fraught as well as economically desperate. The Rentenmark reform of November 1923 rendered the entire series worthless almost immediately after printing.