10 Heller Dross

Dross is a small wine-growing village in Lower Austria's Kamptal region, and like hundreds of Austrian municipalities in 1920, it issued its own emergency small change — Notgeld — to compensate for the near-total disappearance of metal coinage after the war. The Habsburg monetary system had collapsed, the new Republic was scrambling, and villages were effectively on their own for denominations below one Krone.

The Jaksch reference places this within a well-documented but enormous series of local Austrian Notgeld issues, most printed by regional jobbing printers in short runs. Survival rates vary wildly by municipality — some villages issued thousands, others only a few hundred, and redemption campaigns in the mid-1920s removed most from circulation permanently.