50 Heller Thalgau

Thalgau is a small market town in the Flachgau district of Salzburg province, and this 50 Heller note is one of the thousands of Notgeld issues that Austrian municipalities were effectively forced to produce after 1918 when small-denomination coinage vanished almost entirely from circulation — hoarded, melted, or simply never reminted by a state in financial collapse. E. u. K. Müller was a Salzburg commercial printer with no particular specialist currency background, which is exactly the kind of firm most small communities had to rely on.

The "b" suffix in the Jaksch/Pick reference indicates a second variant within the JPR1065 series for Thalgau, suggesting at least minor differences exist between issues — worth cross-referencing against the "a" type before cataloging.