20 Heller Dross

Dross is a small wine-growing village in the Krems district of Lower Austria, and like hundreds of other Austrian municipalities in 1920, it issued its own emergency small change notes — Notgeld — to compensate for the near-total disappearance of coins from circulation following the collapse of the Habsburg monetary system. These local issues were authorized under a broader framework that allowed Gemeinden to print their own fractional currency, with redemption theoretically guaranteed by the issuing municipality.

The designer credit to Rohrhofer is notable — locally designed Notgeld was common, but named designers at the village level are not always recorded. The Jaksch/Pick reference JPR0135.10-2 places this within the documented Lower Austrian municipal series.