50 Heller Lochen

Lochen is a small market commune in Upper Austria, and this 50 Heller Notgeld was issued in 1920 as part of the enormous wave of municipal emergency money that followed Austria's postwar economic collapse. With coinage effectively vanishing from circulation and the central government unable to supply it, thousands of Austrian towns and villages — Lochen among them — printed their own fractional notes to keep local commerce functioning. The designer, Sepp Muer, was a regional artist whose name appears across several Upper Austrian Notgeld issues of this period.

J. Moser of Braunau am Inn was the printer, a short distance from Lochen itself.