50 Heller Reichersberg

Reichersberg am Inn is a small market town in Upper Austria, and this 50 Heller note is a product of the acute small-change shortage that gripped Austria in the immediate postwar years. The collapse of the Habsburg monetary system left municipal authorities across the country scrambling to issue their own emergency Heller denominations — Notgeld — to keep local commerce moving at all.

The signatory, Karl Oetkl, was almost certainly a local official rather than a banking functionary. Austrian municipal Notgeld of this period was authorized locally and carried whatever administrative signatures the issuing body could produce.