50 000 000 000 Mark

Mainz issued its own emergency currency — Notgeld — because the Reichsbank simply could not print and distribute notes fast enough to keep pace with hyperinflation during late 1923. By November of that year, before the Rentenmark stabilization ended the crisis, municipal and commercial issuers across Germany were producing denominations that had been unimaginable months earlier. A fifty-billion-mark note from a city treasury is not unusual for the period; what it documents is the administrative absurdity of a functioning municipality having to run its own currency operation.

Printed locally in Mainz, which was then under French occupation following the Treaty of Versailles — a detail that made local money issuance both practically necessary and politically loaded.