10 000 000 Mark

Laufen sits on the Salzach River directly on the Austro-Bavarian border, and by late summer 1923 that geography mattered enormously. The hyperinflation had progressed so rapidly that the municipal authority — not a bank, but the town administration itself — was issuing its own emergency currency denominated in the tens of millions. Notgeld at this scale was no longer emergency supplementary coinage; it was the functional monetary system.

J. E. Ried was a local printer, not a specialist banknote house. The limitations show.