2 Fillér Hadsegélyező Hivatal

The Hadsegélyező Hivatal — the Austro-Hungarian War Relief Office — issued these fractional emergency notes to address the acute small-change shortage that gripped Hungary from 1915 onward. Metal coinage had effectively disappeared from everyday transactions, hoarded or melted, and the government needed something to fill the gap at the lowest denominations. Fillér-value scrip like this was the result: a stopgap issued by a welfare bureaucracy rather than a central bank, which itself tells you something about how improvised the wartime monetary response had become.