10 Heller Hirschbach

Hirschbach is a small municipality in Upper Austria, and this 10 Heller note is a product of the Notgeld wave that swept Austrian and German communities during the First World War when small-denomination coinage vanished from circulation almost overnight. Stampfl & Comp. in Braunau am Inn — the same town where Adolf Hitler was born, though that connection carries no relevance here — handled printing for numerous local Notgeld issues across the region, making them a minor but reliable provincial press of the period.

Three signatories authenticated this note: the Bürgermeister, his deputy, and a council member. That level of local bureaucratic formality on a 10 Heller emergency piece speaks to how seriously even tiny municipalities treated the legal standing of their improvised currency.