20 000 000 000 Mark Reichsbahndirektion

The Reichsbahndirektion Altona was the regional directorate of the German national railway administration, not a bank — and yet in October 1923 it was issuing its own emergency currency alongside thousands of other German entities scrambling to fill the void left by hyperinflation's total destruction of purchasing power. The Reichsbahn directorates had a practical justification most municipal issuers lacked: they needed to pay workers weekly, sometimes daily, in sums that required notes with face values that would have been incomprehensible eighteen months earlier.

Chr. Adolff was a local Altona printing firm, pressed into notgeld production like dozens of regional printers that year. The twenty billion mark denomination dates this note to the peak collapse period — by late November 1923, even these figures were obsolete.