50 Heller Hadres

Hadres is a small wine-growing village in Lower Austria's Pulkau valley, and this 50 Heller note is one of thousands of Austrian Notgeld issues that flooded the market between 1919 and 1921 when small coinage essentially vanished from circulation. The federal government had no practical answer to the coin shortage, so municipalities — including ones with populations well under a thousand — printed their own emergency pfennig-range notes. Hadres was no exception.

The two signatories, Rudolf Wlczek and Franz Lerch, were almost certainly local officials — likely the Bürgermeister and a council member — rather than banking personnel. Jaksch/Pick reference JPR0328 covers the Hadres series, of which the 50 Heller is the more commonly encountered denomination.