10 000 000 000 Mark

Pinneberg is a small town northwest of Hamburg, and like hundreds of German municipalities in the autumn of 1923, its local magistrate was forced into the currency business by sheer necessity. The Reichsbank could not print fast enough to meet payroll. Local Notgeld of this period — particularly issues from October and November 1923, when denominations climbed into the billions and then trillions — were often printed on whatever stock the local printer had available, which is why paper quality and impression consistency vary so sharply even within a single series.

Belg was a small Pinneberg print shop, not a specialist security printer. The official stamp was the primary authentication device, as it was for most emergency municipal issues of this type.