200 000 000 Mark

This note is Notgeld — emergency municipal currency — issued by the administrative district of Zwickau during the catastrophic hyperinflation of 1923, when the Reichsbank's output could not keep pace with the daily collapse of purchasing power. By August of that year, denominations in the hundreds of millions were routine, and local authorities across Saxony were authorized to print their own supplementary currency to keep commerce functional at all.

Zwickau was an industrial center, and the Amtshauptmannschaft — roughly a county-level administrative body — had both the institutional standing and the local printing capacity to issue legitimate tender. The 200-million-Mark figure, staggering by any peacetime measure, would have bought little more than a loaf of bread by the time this note reached circulation.