20 000 000 000 Mark Spinnerei

Spinnerei St. Blasien A.-G. was a textile spinning mill in the Black Forest town of Sankt Blasien, and like hundreds of German industrial firms in late 1923, it issued its own emergency currency — Notgeld — simply to pay its workers when the Reichsbank could not supply physical notes fast enough to keep pace with hyperinflation. The 20 billion Mark denomination places this squarely in the final, most vertiginous weeks of the inflation, when that figure would have represented perhaps a day's wages at best.

Routed through the local St. Blasier Bank as the issuing intermediary, the note was printed by the town's own Buchdruckerei J. Weißenberger — a small commercial press, not a specialist security printer. The single security feature is a blind stamp, pressed without ink into the paper.