20 Heller Mauthausen

Mauthausen is a small Upper Austrian market town on the Danube, and like hundreds of Austrian municipalities in 1920, it issued its own Notgeld to paper over the catastrophic small-coin shortage that followed the collapse of the Habsburg monetary system. The 20 Heller denomination sits at the lower end of practical everyday use — tram fares, bread, small market transactions — which means circulating examples took real wear. Three manuscript signatures authenticate each note, an unusual burden for a minor municipal issue and one that would have slowed production considerably.

Printed by E. Priezel in Steyr, roughly ten kilometers west of Mauthausen.