20 Heller Mittelberg

Mittelberg is a small village in the Waldviertel region of Lower Austria, and like hundreds of similarly sized Austrian communities in 1920, it issued its own Notgeld to address the acute small-denomination coin shortage that followed the dissolution of the Habsburg monetary system. The Dorfgemeinde — a village council with no banking infrastructure — was legally empowered to do so under emergency provisions that flooded the country with thousands of distinct local issues during this period.

Franz Traunfellner and Karl Gruber signed as municipal authorities, almost certainly the Bürgermeister and a council witness respectively. These signatures were not ceremonial — they carried personal liability under local law.