50 000 000 Mark

Remscheid's 50-million-mark Notgeld appeared in the late summer of 1923, when the Reichsbank's own supply chain had essentially collapsed under the velocity of hyperinflation. Municipal authorities across the Rhineland were printing emergency denominations faster than the ink could dry — Remscheid among them. The city issued its own scrip not out of any monetary ambition but because workers needed something, anything, to take to a bread queue that repriced by the hour.

At 50 million marks, this denomination was already obsolete within weeks of printing. By November 1923, billion- and trillion-mark notes were circulating nationally.