10 Heller Schönbichl

Schönbichl is a small municipality in Lower Austria, and this 10 Heller note is one of the thousands of Notgeld issues that Austrian towns and villages were compelled to produce during and after the First World War as small-denomination coinage vanished entirely from circulation. Carl Amesier in Amstetten was a local commercial printer, not a specialist banknote house — which is exactly what most of these hyper-local issues relied on. The design credit to Ed. Kraus is unusual enough to survive in the record, but Kraus remains otherwise unidentified.

Signed by the Vice-Bürgermeister rather than the Bürgermeister himself — a minor administrative detail that occasionally reflects the chaos of wartime municipal governance.