100 000 Mark Oos; Stolzenberg

Stolzenberg was a chemical factory in Oos, a district of Baden-Baden, and like hundreds of German industrial firms in 1923 it resorted to printing its own emergency currency — Notgeld — when the Reichsbank simply could not supply enough physical notes to keep pace with hyperinflation. These factory-issued notes functioned as wage scrip, circulating internally among workers and locally accepted tradespeople rather than through any banking system. The 100,000 Mark denomination, extraordinary by any prewar standard, was already being outpaced by inflation before the ink dried.