10 000 000 000 Mark

Pößneck was a small Thuringian town of perhaps 15,000 people when its municipal savings bank was forced to issue emergency currency denominated in the tens of billions. This note belongs to the final, most grotesque phase of Weimar hyperinflation — by the time 10-billion-mark denominations were being printed by local stationers for town savings banks, the Reichsbank had effectively lost control of the money supply entirely, and hundreds of German municipalities were producing their own Notgeld simply to pay wages and enable basic commerce.

The overprint security feature here is telling: the underlying stock was almost certainly prepared in advance, with the astronomical denomination added once earlier printings became worthless overnight. Gerold-Verlag printing and issuing in the same small town is itself an artifact of the crisis — there was no time, and no point, in sourcing materials from elsewhere.