20 Heller Stössing

Stössing is a small Lower Austrian village — population well under a thousand even today — which makes this Heller note a product of genuine local desperation rather than municipal ambition. The acute coin shortage that struck Austria in the final years of World War One and continued into the early Republic forced hundreds of tiny Gemeinden to print their own emergency currency, the so-called Kriegs- and Notgeldscheine. Bommer in St. Pölten was one of the regional printers who kept busy supplying them.

Three signatories authenticated this note by hand: the Bürgermeister, his deputy, and a single Gemeinderat. That combination suggests a bare quorum — the minimum officialdom required to give the paper any legal standing within the village.