100 000 000 Mark

Pößneck was a small industrial town in Thuringia, and like hundreds of German municipalities in 1923, its city treasury found itself legally empowered — and practically compelled — to issue emergency currency as Reichsbank notes became worthless faster than they could be printed. This 100-million-Mark denomination was not an outlier; by late 1923, a single loaf of bread in many German cities cost hundreds of millions of marks, and local Notgeld had to keep pace with hyperinflation that was rewriting itself daily.

C. G. Vogel was a local Pößneck printer, not a specialist banknote house. The embossed seal substituted for the kind of intaglio security printing that the city had neither the equipment nor time to commission.