1 Krone Mauthausen; PoW Camp

Mauthausen, in Upper Austria, held tens of thousands of Russian, Italian, and Serbian prisoners during the First World War — a very different history from the site's later infamy as a Nazi concentration camp from 1938 onward. The K. u. k. Kriegsgefangenlager there issued its own internal camp currency to prevent prisoners from acquiring circulating Austrian Kronen, a deliberate policy applied across the Austro-Hungarian POW system to contain both escape funding and black-market contact with civilian populations.

Camp scrip of this type was produced cheaply, often locally, and most was destroyed or simply disintegrated after the armistice. Surviving examples are scarce precisely because nobody thought to preserve them.