100 Schilling

This note was issued under exceptionally compressed circumstances. Austria was liberated in April 1945, and the provisional government needed a functioning currency almost immediately — the old Reichsmark was tainted by occupation, and a distinctly Austrian issue was a political necessity before the ink was dry on any administrative arrangement. The ONB had been suppressed since the 1938 Anschluss, and this series marked its formal reconstitution.

Printed domestically in Vienna in the immediate postwar months, the note circulated during a period of acute shortages and a parallel black market that rendered official exchange rates largely fictional. The 1945 series was superseded by the Schilling Law of November 1945, which required exchange at controlled rates — effectively a currency reform that wiped out much of the inflationary overhang inherited from the Nazi period.