5 000 000 000 Mark

Hamborn was an industrial city in the Ruhr, and by the time this note was issued in 1923 it was already weeks away from ceasing to exist as an independent municipality — it was absorbed into Duisburg in October 1929, but during the hyperinflation peak it was issuing its own Notgeld like dozens of other German cities scrambling to keep commerce functional as Reichsbank notes became worthless faster than they could be printed. A five-billion-mark denomination from a mid-sized industrial city is a precise snapshot of how completely the currency had collapsed.

Local Notgeld of this magnitude was typically printed on whatever stock was available, sometimes on single-sided sheets with minimal security features.