10 000 000 Mark

Dinkelsbühl was a minor Bavarian market town with no central bank connection — which is precisely why it, like hundreds of other German municipalities, was forced to print its own emergency currency during the hyperinflation of 1923. By the time denominations reached eight figures, the Reichsbank simply could not produce notes fast enough to keep pace with collapsing purchasing power. Local authorities filled the gap with whatever printing capacity they had on hand.

The embossed seal was the town's primary anti-counterfeiting measure — a telling indicator of how rudimentary municipal notgeld production had become by mid-1923. Within weeks of issue, 10,000,000 Mark would have been worth less than the paper it was printed on.