50 000 000 000 Kreis Rendsburg, Overprint on 5 000 000 000 Mark

Rendsburg's county administration issued this overprint during the most acute phase of the 1923 hyperinflation, when the Reichsbank's central supply of emergency currency could not keep pace with the daily collapse of purchasing power. Local authorities across Germany were authorized — reluctantly, and with considerable bureaucratic friction — to produce their own Notgeld at denominations that would have been unthinkable even weeks earlier. Overprinting existing 5,000,000,000 Mark stock with a tenfold multiplier was the fastest solution available.

The watermarked paper provides one of the few security concessions in what was otherwise purely functional emergency printing.