70 Heller Obernberg bei Gries am Brenner

Obernberg am Brenner is a small Tyrolean village sitting at roughly 1400 metres, straddling what became the contested Austrian-Italian border zone after the 1919 Treaty of Saint-Germain-en-Laye. The municipality issued these Heller notes as part of the broader Notgeld wave that swept rural Austria when coin shortages made small transactions nearly impossible — a problem acute enough in isolated mountain communities that even the smallest Gemeinden were authorised to print their own emergency scrip.

The signature of Bürgermeister Hölzler provides the only personal trace of the local official who authorised this particular series under extraordinarily uncertain political conditions, with the Brenner Pass itself having just become an international frontier.