50 Heller Schalchen

A Notgeld issue from one of hundreds of small Austrian municipalities that were forced to produce their own emergency fractional currency after the postwar collapse of the Habsburg monetary system left a critical shortage of small-denomination coin. Schalchen is a minor commune in Upper Austria, and its 50 Heller note was printed locally by J. Moser in nearby Braunau am Inn — the same town, a detail worth noting, where Hitler was born nineteen years earlier, though that connection has no bearing on the note itself.

Signed by the Bürgermeister Schmidinger. These municipal notes were theoretically redeemable but in practice many were never called in, which is why surviving examples tend toward unused condition.