50 Heller

Lausa bei Losenstein is a tiny Upper Austrian village — population well under a thousand even today — and this 50 Heller note is a product of the Notgeld wave that swept rural Austria between 1919 and 1921. With the post-war monetary system in disarray and small coinage almost impossible to obtain, even the smallest municipalities were authorized to print their own emergency scrip. The Bürgermeister's signature, rather than a bank officer's, tells you everything about how local these instruments actually were.

The issuer's extreme obscurity makes survival rates difficult to assess, but rural Notgeld of this scale was rarely printed in large numbers and even more rarely retained by recipients once redeemable coin returned.