5 000 000 000 Mark Lohnscheck

Mengen is a small town in the Swabian district of Sigmaringen, and like hundreds of German municipalities in the hyperinflation of 1923, it issued its own emergency wage cheques — Lohnschecks — to pay workers when the Reichsbank simply could not print and distribute currency fast enough to keep pace with collapsing purchasing power. By the time notes in the billion-mark denominations were being issued, a single loaf of bread could cost several hundred million marks, and the five-billion figure here reflects just how brief the useful life of any individual note was.

Württemberg municipal Lohnschecks of this period were typically printed locally on short runs with minimal security features, making surviving examples genuinely uncommon — most were spent within days and disintegrated in circulation.