10 000 000 000 Mark

Recklinghausen was a mid-sized Ruhr industrial city, and like hundreds of German municipalities in the autumn of 1923, the Magistrat was forced to print its own emergency currency simply to meet payroll. The Reichsbank could not supply notes fast enough as the inflation doubled and redoubled weekly. A ten-billion Mark denomination — unthinkable even twelve months earlier — was routine by October 1923, and this note was almost certainly spent within days of issue, if not hours.

Locally printed Notgeld of this period tends to survive in better condition than nationally circulated issues precisely because so little time elapsed between printing and the November 1923 stabilization. The signatures of Popp and Knaup identify the Bürgermeister and a senior municipal official, the standard authorization pair for Recklinghausen's emergency issues.