50 Heller Leiben

Leiben is a small market town on the Danube in Lower Austria, and like hundreds of similar municipalities it issued emergency small change — Notgeld — during the severe coin shortage that followed the First World War. The 50 Heller denomination places this squarely in that wave of local scrip that flooded Austria between 1919 and 1921, most of it redeemable only within the issuing community and worth nothing two villages over.

The printed date of 30 April 1945 almost certainly refers to a later reprinting or a catalog annotation date — that date is the day Soviet forces completed their encirclement of Berlin and Adolf Hitler died, an unlikely moment for an Austrian market town to be issuing 1920-dated Notgeld for the first time. Designer credit to Jos. J. Beyer is consistent with the regional commercial artists who handled much of Lower Austria's municipal Notgeld work.