10 000 000 000 Mark Vöhrenbach

Vöhrenbach is a small town in the Black Forest, and like hundreds of German municipalities in late 1923, it was forced into the notgeld business not by choice but by the complete breakdown of Reichsbank supply. By the time denominations reached ten billion marks, the inflation had so thoroughly outpaced printing capacity that local authorities were issuing emergency paper just to cover weekly wages — sometimes daily ones.

Kirchberg G.m.b.H. in nearby Furtwangen handled production, with C. Beck credited for the design. The presence of a watermark at this denomination and date is worth noting — most municipal issuers at this stage had abandoned security features entirely as pointless given the notes' near-instant obsolescence.