20 Heller

Sankt Aegidi is a small municipality in Upper Austria, and like hundreds of similar communities across the former Habsburg lands, it issued its own emergency currency — Notgeld — in the years following the collapse of the empire. These local issues filled a genuine void: the new Austrian state could not keep pace with demand for small-denomination coinage, and communities were left to improvise. The Gemeinde notes had no central oversight of design or print quality, which accounts for the wide variation in paper stock and ink stability seen across surviving examples.

The Jaksch reference JPR0875IIIa-20 places this firmly in the Upper Austrian municipal series. Condition fragility is a known issue with many of these rural issues — thin wartime paper and amateur printing mean foxing and edge toning are common.