500 000 Mark

Blaubeuren was a small Swabian town of perhaps four thousand people when it issued this note in 1923. Like hundreds of German municipalities during the hyperinflation peak, it had no realistic alternative — Reichsbank currency was depreciating faster than it could be physically transported and distributed, forcing local authorities to print emergency Notgeld simply to keep daily commerce functioning. A half-million marks, a sum that would have seemed grotesque three years earlier, was by mid-1923 roughly the cost of a loaf of bread.

Dr. Karl Höhn was a local printer, not a specialist banknote firm. The signatures of Dorn and Klotz represent municipal officials countersigning under emergency authorization.