20 Heller Eferding - small issue

Eferding is a small Upper Austrian market town, and like hundreds of similar municipalities it issued its own emergency paper money — Notgeld — in the immediate postwar years when small-denomination coinage had effectively vanished from circulation. The 1919 issues were a practical response to a genuine liquidity problem, not a commemorative or speculative exercise.

A print run of over twelve million for a town of roughly three thousand inhabitants is the striking figure here. That number reflects centralized bulk printing for regional distribution rather than purely local need — a common arrangement in Austrian Notgeld production of this period, where private printers fulfilled orders for multiple municipalities simultaneously.