50 Heller Wachau - St Michael

Spitz an der Donau is a small wine-market town in the Wachau valley, and its 1920 Heller notgeld belongs to the wave of Austrian municipal emergency currency issued after the collapse of the Habsburg economy left small communities starved of small-denomination coins. The Wachau series from this area is among the more sought-after Austrian notgeld precisely because the issuing communities were tiny — Spitz had well under two thousand residents — and print runs were correspondingly limited.

The "St Michael" designation distinguishes this within the local series by chapel or parish reference, a cataloguing convention common to multi-piece Wachau issues. The Jaksc/Pick reference JPR1122.09IIa places this in the second type classification, indicating a later printing or variant within the 1920 issue sequence.