30 Heller Schwödiau

Schwödiau — today the village of Svidník in Slovakia, though the toponym is complicated by the shifting Czech, Slovak, and German place-name variants across administrations — issued this Heller notgeld during the acute small-change shortage that paralyzed Austrian and German commercial life from roughly 1916 onward. Municipal authorities across the former Habsburg lands printed their own fractional notes because coins had vanished into hoarding and metal requisition drives. H. Siebert as designer and Josef Schilhuber as signatory suggest purely local production, typical of the smaller Bohemian and Moravian communities that handled their own printing rather than commissioning from Vienna or Prague specialists.