40 Heller Kreith

Kreith is a small village in Tyrol, Austria, and like hundreds of similarly tiny municipalities, it issued Notgeld during the severe coin shortage that gripped Austria from roughly 1919 onward. The 40 Heller denomination fits the pattern of small-change emergency scrip produced when metal coinage had effectively vanished from daily commerce. These hyper-local issues were printed in extremely limited quantities — often by regional printers with modest equipment — and distributed almost entirely within the issuing community itself.

The Jaksch catalogue reference places this within the broader Austrian Notgeld corpus, but Kreith's issues remain among the more obscure entries even within that category. Survival rates for village-level Tyrolean Notgeld vary considerably; many were redeemed and pulped, while others were quietly kept as curiosities by locals who recognized even then that the scrip had more value as a memento than as money.