500 000 000 Mark

Breslau municipal authorities issued this 500-million-mark note during the peak weeks of the German hyperinflation, when denominations that would have seemed hallucinatory eighteen months earlier had become mundane. German cities and counties were legally permitted to issue emergency currency — Notgeld — when the Reichsbank could not physically supply enough notes to meet wage and trade demands. Breslau was one of dozens of Silesian municipalities that ran their own printing operations rather than wait for central distribution.

Grass, Barth & Comp., operating under the W. Friedrich imprint, was a local commercial printing house pressed into producing what was effectively monetary paper. The dual signatures of Wagner and Matthes authenticate the issuance authority.