200 000 000 Mark

Kreis Moers — a largely industrial district in the Lower Rhine region — issued this 200,000,000 Mark note during the peak inflationary spiral of late 1923, when the Reichsmark was collapsing faster than the central bank could respond. District and municipal authorities across Germany stepped in to print their own emergency currency, Notgeld, not as an act of defiance but out of sheer necessity: workers needed payable denominations that matched the daily wage calculations as prices doubled every few days.

The Moers district was coal country, and keeping miners paid was not an abstraction. By the time this denomination existed, two hundred million marks bought roughly a loaf of bread.