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During the first world war (1914-1918), there was a shortage of small change, so towns had started to print their own small denomination notes. Some of these notes had control numbers and some were hand signed. There came a time when the German Reichbank, could no longer meet the demand for money, so it appears that it authorised states to issue their own. The various states and municipalities, began printing their own money, quite often with no collateral or assets to back it up. The market was swamped with issues of money, where towns and cities tried to issue more colourful notes than its neighbours and also with more and more different designs.

Over this period the necessity issues had been overtaken by the notes issued by the towns and municipalities, which were now feeding the requirements of collectors of these small 'emergency' issues. The great majority of these later issues, were composed of 'sets' (serienscheine) and all collectors will hopefully have come across many different issues. The eventual collapse of the German monetary system was inevitable. In late 1923 inflation had reached astronomical heights and notes were in circulation which had a face value of billions of marks.

In the German hyper-inflation of 1923, notes of 'milliard' were issued. These were 'thousands of millions' in the counting system;