1 Heller Katzenau bei Linz; PoW Camp

Katzenau was one of Austria-Hungary's internment camps for civilian suspects — Russophile Ukrainians, Serbs, and others deemed politically unreliable — not a prisoner-of-war camp in the conventional military sense. The distinction mattered enormously to those held there: internees had no formal combatant status and no protecting power under the Hague Conventions, leaving their treatment entirely at the discretion of camp administration. Mortality at Katzenau was severe, particularly in the early war years from typhus and exposure.

Camp scrip of this kind circulated within a closed internal economy — redeemable at the camp canteen and nowhere else. The single signature, Reicher, almost certainly belongs to the camp commandant or chief administrator authorizing the issue.