50 Heller Hallein

Hallein's 50 Heller notgeld of 1920 was printed by R. Kiesel in Salzburg at a moment when the postwar collapse of the Austro-Hungarian monetary system had left Austrian municipalities scrambling to produce their own emergency small change. The chronic shortage of coin — accelerated by metal hoarding and the dissolution of imperial supply chains — pushed hundreds of towns to commission local printers for fractional denominations that the central authorities could not or would not provide.

The designer credit to Felgel-Farnholz is worth noting: many notgeld pieces from the Salzburg region were anonymous jobbing work, and a named designer suggests the Stadtgemeinde treated this as something more than a purely functional stopgap.