500 000 000 Mark

By late 1923, German municipal authorities were printing their own emergency currency because the Reichsbank simply could not produce notes fast enough to keep pace with hyperinflation. Düsseldorf's 500-million-Mark Notgeld is a product of that administrative chaos — a city government acting as a de facto central bank for its own population, issuing denominations that would have seemed absurd twelve months earlier.

Düsseldorf was under French and Belgian occupation at the time, a consequence of the Ruhr occupation that began in January 1923. Local note issues therefore carried an additional political dimension: German civil authorities printing currency in defiance of occupying powers who had their own ideas about how the region's economy should function.