50 Heller Lembach im Mühlkreis, Red issue

Lembach im Mühlkreis is a small market town in Upper Austria, and like hundreds of comparable municipalities it resorted to printing its own emergency currency — Notgeld — when the postwar coin shortage made everyday commerce nearly impossible. The red-ink designation distinguishes this issue within the Lembach series, which ran across multiple color variants to discourage substitution between denominations or issue rounds.

H. Bayer's involvement is worth noting: local Notgeld designers were often schoolteachers, printers, or amateur artists pressed into service, and the quality varied accordingly. The JPR reference places this firmly within the Jaksch/Pick Austrian Notgeld cataloguing system, where Lembach's issues are among the more thoroughly documented of the smaller Upper Austrian communes.