10 Heller Vitis

Vitis is a small market town in the Waldviertel region of Lower Austria, and this note is a piece of Kriegsgeld — emergency municipal scrip issued during the First World War when small-denomination coinage disappeared almost entirely from circulation across Austria-Hungary. Hoarding and metal requisitions had stripped copper and nickel coins from everyday commerce by 1916–17, forcing hundreds of municipalities, parishes, and even private businesses to print their own fractional notes to make change.

Pennerstorfer and Muhr were almost certainly local officials — mayor and town secretary, or equivalent — rather than banking personnel. The Jaksch/Pick JPR series for Austrian notgeld runs into the thousands of entries, which gives a sense of how widespread this improvised system became.