500 000 000 Mark

Pirmasens was a shoe-manufacturing town in the Palatinate, and by late 1923 it was printing emergency currency in denominations that would have been unthinkable eighteen months earlier. This 500-million-mark Notgeld was issued by the city government itself — not a bank — because the Reichsbank simply could not supply denominations large enough to meet daily wage payments during the peak of the hyperinflation. Municipal and district authorities across Germany assumed that role by necessity.

S. Semar's design credit is uncommon for Pirmasens Notgeld; most of the city's emergency issues from this period were produced with minimal typographic effort. A locally credited designer suggests this note received slightly more deliberate treatment than the purely functional pieces churned out in the same weeks.