20 Heller Lochen

Lochen is a small parish in Upper Austria, and like hundreds of similarly sized municipalities it issued emergency currency — Notgeld — in the early 1920s when the collapse of the Habsburg monetary system left small denominations effectively nonexistent in everyday commerce. The 20 Heller denomination was among the most practically necessary; coins of that value had largely vanished from circulation through hoarding and metal shortages dating back to the war years.

J. Moser of Braunau am Inn was a regional printer serving several Upper Austrian municipalities during this period, not one of the larger Viennese houses. Local production kept costs down but meant smaller print runs and less consistent quality control — factors that now make individual municipal issues from this printer harder to attribute with confidence.