5 000 000 000 Mark

Dirlewang is a village in Swabia — population then well under a thousand — and yet in late 1923 its municipal council was authorized to issue five billion marks on a single note. That figure, incomprehensible by any peacetime standard, was barely enough to cover a loaf of bread at the peak of the Weimar hyperinflation. The Marktgemeinderat had no printing infrastructure of its own; the job went to Jakob Niederhuber's press in the nearby market town of Mindelheim, a local commercial printer with no particular banknote pedigree.

The watermarked paper is the one concession to security on an issue that was, practically speaking, obsolete almost the moment it left the press.