50 000 000 Mark

Remscheid's 50-million Mark note dates from the most acute phase of the Weimar hyperinflation — by late summer 1923, municipal governments across the Rhineland and Westphalia were printing emergency Notgeld simply because the Reichsbank could not supply legal tender fast enough to meet payroll. Cities like Remscheid, a center of tool and cutlery manufacturing, had large industrial workforces requiring cash wages weekly, sometimes daily, as purchasing power collapsed between morning and afternoon.

Oberbürgermeister Trautmann's signature carries genuine administrative weight here — municipal signatories on Notgeld were legally accountable in ways that anonymous bank stamps were not.