10 Heller

Puchberg im Machland issued this Heller note as a Notgeld during the acute coin shortage that gripped Austria from 1916 onward, when the imperial government melted down small denomination coinage for the war effort and never adequately replaced it. Municipalities, businesses, and even individual estates began printing their own fractional paper to make change — legally tolerated rather than officially sanctioned, and valid only within the issuing community.

The official stamp was the sole security measure most of these village issues could manage. It also tied validity directly to the issuing authority in a way that serial numbers alone could not.