How a Trillion-Mark Note Undid a Republic's Trust

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

By November 1923 a single US dollar bought several trillion German marks, and children in Berlin built towers out of banknotes or flew kites made from them, worth less by the day than the paper of the kite itself. The collapse followed France and Belgium's occupation of the Ruhr in January 1923, a response to German default on reparations, and the Weimar government's decision to fund passive resistance by printing money rather than raising taxes. Historian Richard J. Evans has described the culture the crisis produced as one preoccupied with criminals, embezzlers and profiteers, in which the democratic government itself became the public's preferred scapegoat, an association it never shook. Historian Martin Geyer has traced how the inflation left farmers and small savers feeling estranged from the established parties altogether, pushing some toward agrarian radical movements that further destabilized the young republic. The currency reform of November 1923, a new note called the Rentenmark backed by land and industrial assets rather than gold, stopped the collapse within weeks. It could not undo what the crisis had already done to public confidence in the Republic's competence, a wound reopened six years later by the Depression.