20 Heller Zeillern

Zeillern is a small parish municipality in Lower Austria, and like hundreds of similarly modest communities, it issued its own emergency paper money — Notgeld — during the coin shortage that gripped Austria in the final years of World War I and its immediate aftermath. These municipal issues were a matter of local necessity, not monetary policy: small coins had effectively vanished from circulation, hoarded or melted, and communities were left to improvise.

Three signatories authenticated this note, almost certainly local officials rather than professional bankers. That detail alone places this squarely in the grassroots tier of Austrian Notgeld — no bank, no district authority, just a village committee keeping commerce moving.