20 Heller Ostermiething

Ostermiething is a small market town in Upper Austria, and like hundreds of similarly sized municipalities, it issued emergency paper money — Notgeld — during the acute coin shortage that gripped Austria between roughly 1916 and 1921. These small-denomination Heller notes filled a gap that the central monetary authorities in Vienna were too overwhelmed to address, with metal diverted to the war effort and small change effectively vanishing from daily commerce.

Municipal Notgeld of this type was produced locally or through small regional printers, with quality varying enormously from one town to the next. Ostermiething's issues are among the more obscure in the corpus — not widely collected, not widely documented.