20 Heller Lofer

Austrian Notgeld of this type — small municipal emergency notes issued during and after the First World War — was produced because the Habsburg monetary system had effectively collapsed at the retail level by 1916. Coin hoarding left market towns without usable small change, so local authorities were permitted to print their own. Lofer, a small Tyrolean market community in the Salzburg upland, issued these through Wagner in Innsbruck, the go-to printer for numerous Tirolean and Salzburg municipal issues of the period.

The Jaksc catalogue designation places this firmly in the Austrian provincial Notgeld corpus. The 20 Heller denomination is among the most common face values for this type — practical for daily transactions, replacing the 20 Heller coin that had vanished from circulation almost entirely by mid-war.