5 000 000 000 Mark

Karlsruhe's city council, like hundreds of German municipal authorities in late 1923, was forced into the absurd position of issuing its own billion-mark emergency currency simply to meet payroll. The five-billion-mark denomination places this note in the final weeks of the hyperinflation peak — by November 1923, the Reichsbank's own notes were struggling to keep pace with daily price movements, and notgeld of this magnitude was already becoming obsolete before the ink dried.

The embossed stamp was a practical anti-counterfeiting measure at a time when the cost of sophisticated intaglio security made little economic sense — the note's face value would halve within days regardless.