50 Heller Kilb

Kilb is a small market town in Lower Austria, and this 50 Heller note is a Notgeld — emergency scrip issued to address the catastrophic coin shortage that followed Austria's defeat in the First World War. That a parish, rather than a municipality or savings institution, serves as the issuing authority is unusual even by the loose standards of Austrian Notgeld, where the definition of a legitimate issuer was stretched considerably between 1919 and 1921.

Sommer of St. Pölten was a regional printer responsible for a number of Lower Austrian Notgeld issues during this period. The dual signatures — one from the Sparkassedirektor, one from the Bürgermeister — suggest the parish was borrowing institutional credibility from both the local savings bank and the civil administration to give the scrip workable authority in daily transactions.