100 000 000 Mark Reichsbanknote

By August 1923, when this note entered circulation, the Reichsbank was printing on one side only to save time — the presses simply could not keep up with demand. The 100,000,000 Mark denomination, which would have seemed grotesque even a year earlier, was itself obsolete within weeks. A loaf of bread in Berlin cost more than this note's face value before the month was out.

Pick 107 is among the more frequently encountered survivors of the hyperinflation series precisely because so many were printed and so few were actually spent before becoming worthless. The Rentenmark stabilization of November 1923 ended the madness, but billions of these notes were simply abandoned — stuffed in drawers, used as scrap paper, kept as curiosities.