5 Schilling

This note belongs to the first postwar Austrian issue, authorized almost immediately after the Red Army entered Vienna in April 1945. The Oesterreichische Nationalbank was reconstituted under Soviet occupation before Western Allied forces had even entered the city, which gave the USSR considerable early influence over Austrian monetary policy — a tension that would shape the occupation period for the next decade.

Printed in Vienna under difficult conditions, with paper and ink supplies severely constrained. Rudolf Junk and Karl Sterrer were both established Austrian graphic artists whose pre-Anschluss work the bank deliberately drew on, a conscious act of cultural distancing from the Reich-era currency this series replaced.