20 Heller Spital am Pyhrn

Spital am Pyhrn is a small market town in Upper Austria, and like hundreds of similarly sized Austrian communities, it resorted to issuing its own small-denomination emergency paper in the years following World War One. The chronic shortage of coin — silver had been hoarded, base metal coinage disrupted — forced municipal authorities across the country to fill the gap locally. These Notgeld issues were authorized under emergency provisions and typically printed in very limited runs for purely local use.

The 20 Heller denomination places this squarely in the low-end transactional range, the kind of value exchanged daily for bread or postage.