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5 Heller
| Issuer | Gemeinde Mauthausen (Market Town of Mauthausen, Upper Austria) |
|---|---|
| Year | 1920 |
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| Composition | Paper |
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| Obverse description | Brown letterpress on cream paper within a thin ruled border. The central vignette presents an oval cartouche enclosing a rural landscape with a country house and tall trees lining a path, the oval wreathed in acanthus-style foliage with radiating sun-ray lines filling the upper background. The denomination numerals '5' and 'H' appear in the upper left and upper right corners respectively, with the issuer legend in bold hand-lettered Gothic script along the lower margin. |
|---|---|
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| Protection description | Violet circular municipal stamp of Mauthausen applied to the reverse, accompanied by a manuscript countersignature of the Gemeindevorstand (municipal board). |
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| Comments |
Mauthausen's 5 Heller Notgeld belongs to the vast wave of municipal emergency money that Austrian towns were forced to produce after the collapse of the Habsburg monarchy left the new republic with a catastrophic small-change shortage. The central government simply could not supply enough low-denomination coin to keep local commerce moving, so individual Gemeinden were authorized — loosely — to print their own.
The official stamp is the only security measure standing between this note and outright counterfeiting, which tells you everything about the economic desperation and the limited technical resources available to a small Upper Austrian market town in 1920.