75 Heller Lofer

Lofer is a small market town in Salzburg Province, and like hundreds of Austrian municipalities during World War I, it issued its own small-denomination emergency paper — Notgeld — to compensate for the near-total disappearance of metal coinage from circulation. The hoarding of copper and silver accelerated sharply after 1914, and by 1916–1917 the shortage of small change had become acute enough that central authorities permitted local bodies to print their own stopgap scrip.

Wagner of Innsbruck handled production for numerous Tyrolean and Salzburg communities during this period, which makes attribution straightforward but also means the printing quality varies little across the run.