20 000 000 Mark

Ludwigshafen's municipal administration — like hundreds of German city governments in 1923 — was forced into the business of emergency currency issuance simply because the Reichsbank could not print fast enough to keep pace with hyperinflation. By August of that year, a 20-million Mark denomination was barely sufficient for basic transactions; many of these Notgeld issues were rendered functionally obsolete within weeks of printing.

The printer here, Weiss & Hameier, was a local Ludwigshafen firm — genuinely local production, not a job farmed out to one of the major specialty printers like Giesecke & Devrient. The facsimile signature attributed to Bürgermeister Weiss raises the obvious question of whether the signatory shared a name with the printing house, though no documented connection has been established.