100 000 000 000 Mark Handelskammer

Osnabrück's Chamber of Commerce issued this note during the final, vertigo-inducing weeks of the Weimar hyperinflation — by late 1923, the Reichsbank could not print fast enough to meet payroll demand, and hundreds of municipal and commercial bodies across Germany issued their own Notgeld to cover wages. A hundred billion marks. At the peak of the crisis in November 1923, that denomination would barely buy a newspaper.

The Handelskammer series from Osnabrück is among the more obscure provincial emergency issues of that period, dwarfed in collector attention by the flood of Berlin and Hamburg material.