50 000 000 000 Mark

Krefeld issued this note at the absolute peak of the German hyperinflation crisis — 50 billion marks, a denomination that would have been unimaginable twelve months earlier. Municipal authorities across the Rhine Province were printing emergency currency (Notgeld) because the Reichsbank simply could not produce paper money fast enough to meet demand. Krefeld, a prosperous textile center, had its own printing resources and issued locally rather than waiting on central supply.

By November 1923, when the Rentenmark stabilization finally took hold, notes like this one were worth fractions of a pfennig. Most were discarded immediately.