20 Heller Gresten

Gresten is a small market town in Lower Austria, and like hundreds of similar municipalities, it issued emergency paper money — Notgeld — during the acute coin shortage that gripped Austria from around 1916 onward. Wartime metal demands stripped small denominations from circulation almost entirely, forcing local authorities to fill the gap with their own scrip. The Marktgemeinde had no printing infrastructure of its own; these notes were typically ordered from local printers or stationers and redeemed locally, with no standing beyond the issuing community's good faith.

Survival rates for Austrian municipal Notgeld vary enormously. Notes that circulated heavily in small communities often disintegrated; those saved by collectors in the early 1920s Notgeld collecting craze tend to account for most surviving examples.