500 000 Mark

Bad Tölz is a small spa town in Upper Bavaria, and its city council had no business printing half-million Mark notes — except that by mid-1923, the Reichsbank simply could not supply adequate emergency currency fast enough to keep local commerce functioning. Hundreds of German municipalities, districts, and private firms did exactly the same thing, flooding the country with Notgeld that rendered itself worthless within weeks of issue.

K. Demmel's print shop was a local commercial operation, not a security printer. That provenance matters — quality control varied enormously among these municipal issues, and Demmel's output for Bad Tölz is among the more modest productions of the hyperinflation series.