500 000 Mark

Erbach im Odenwald was a small administrative district in Hesse, and like hundreds of similar German localities in 1923, its Kreisausschuss was forced into printing its own emergency currency as hyperinflation destroyed the purchasing power of Reichsbank notes faster than Berlin could replace them. Aug. Franz was a local printer — not a security printing house — pressed into producing what amounted to official scrip with no technical defenses beyond an applied administrative stamp and a manuscript signature from the district official v. Werner.

At 500,000 Mark, this note was already obsolete within weeks of issue. By November 1923, a single US dollar was exchanging for over four trillion Mark.