20 000 000 000 Mark

Singen-Hohentwiel was a mid-sized industrial town in Baden, and like hundreds of German municipalities in late 1923, it issued its own emergency currency — Notgeld — when the Reichsbank simply could not produce denominations fast enough to keep pace with hyperinflation. By the time notes in the twenty-billion mark range were being printed, workers were famously being paid twice daily so wages could be spent before losing value by evening.

The Singener Verlagsgesellschaft was primarily a publishing house, not a security printer. That a local press was pressed into producing currency at this denomination tells you everything about how completely the conventional monetary infrastructure had broken down by autumn 1923.