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100 000 000 000 Mark
| Issuer | Stadt Apolda (City of Apolda), Thuringia |
|---|---|
| Year | 1923 |
| Type | Log in to see details |
| Value | 100 000 000 000 Mark (100 000 000 000) |
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| Composition | Log in to see details |
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| Obverse description | Uniface notgeld printed in green on pale cream paper, with an all-over guilloche underprint of interlocking rosette and diamond patterns forming the background across the entire face. The denomination "Einhundert Milliarden Mark" is rendered in large blackletter (Fraktur) script at centre, flanked at each corner by numeral "100" over "Milliarden" set within circular guilloche vignettes. A central text block in Fraktur script reads the redemption clause dated "Apolda, den 2. November 1923," below which appear two manuscript signatures above the titles "Oberbürgermeister" and "Vorsitzender," with the city arms of Apolda engraved at the foot between them. Series letter "M" and a serial number appear at lower left and lower right respectively, with the printer's imprint "Adolf Forker, Leipzig" at bottom right; two cancellation punch-holes are visible at lower left and lower right. |
|---|---|
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| Reverse description | The reverse is unprinted, showing only the plain cream paper stock with show-through of the obverse letterpress impression visible in mirror image, and the two cancellation punch-holes at the lower corners matching those on the obverse. |
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| Comments |
Apolda was a mid-sized Thuringian textile town — best known then, as now, for its knitting industry — with no special claim to monetary history except that in late 1923 it did what hundreds of German municipalities were doing: printed its own emergency currency because the Reichsbank simply could not supply enough notes fast enough. The hundred-billion-mark denomination dates this squarely to October or November 1923, the terminal phase of the hyperinflation, when denominations that would have seemed hallucinatory a year earlier were spent on bread.
Adolf Forker was a commercial Leipzig printer, not a specialist security firm. At this stage of the crisis, that distinction had largely ceased to matter.