40 Heller Spital am Pyhrn

Spital am Pyhrn is a small market town in Upper Austria, and like hundreds of similar municipalities it issued notgeld during the acute coin shortage that gripped Austria from around 1916 onward. The Ortsgemeinde — the local civic authority, not a bank — was the issuer here, which was entirely typical of the smaller notgeld producers. Josef Grundner's signature as a local official rather than a financial officer tells you everything about how improvised this emergency coinage substitute was.

The Jaksc/Pick reference places this within the well-documented Austrian local notgeld corpus, but the IIb suffix indicates a specific variant — likely a paper stock or overprint distinction within the 40 Heller denomination run.