50 Heller

Fraham is a small rural commune in Upper Austria, and this 50 Heller notgeld is exactly the kind of note that proliferated across Austria in the early 1920s when coin shortages made small-denomination exchange nearly impossible. The issuing authority here is the municipal office itself — the Gemeinde-Amt — rather than a savings bank or merchant association, which was common enough in village-scale communities that lacked a local financial institution willing to take on the paperwork.

Printed by Huber in nearby Urfahr — the town directly across the Danube from Linz, since absorbed into the city — the signature of Karl Huber as Bürgermeister raises the obvious question of whether printer and mayor were the same family. No definitive answer is on record, but the coincidence is noted in regional notgeld literature.