50 Heller Eschenau

Eschenau is a small market town in the Hainfeld district of Lower Austria, and like hundreds of similarly modest municipalities, it issued its own emergency paper money during the acute coin shortage that gripped Austria from 1914 onward. These Notgeld issues were a practical local response — small coins had vanished from circulation almost immediately after war broke out, hoarded by the public or melted down. Municipal authorities were left to fill the gap themselves.

The Jaksch/Pick reference JPR0186a places this among the documented Lower Austrian series, though surviving examples from minor rural issuers like Eschenau are genuinely uncommon — small-town print runs were modest and redemption rates high.