50 000 000 Mark

Hamburg, like other German states and municipalities, was forced into emergency currency production in 1923 as the Reichsbank's printing capacity collapsed under hyperinflation. By the time denominations reached the fifty-million mark range — summer into autumn of 1923 — notes were losing purchasing power faster than they could be distributed. The Verlagsgesellschaft deutscher Konsumvereine was a publishing cooperative primarily serving the German consumer cooperative movement, pressed into notgeld production simply because it had functioning presses.

The cooperative-press origin is the detail worth noting here: this was not a bank printer or a specialist security printer, but a trade publisher turned emergency currency producer by circumstance.