20 Heller Wieselburg

Wieselburg an der Erlauf is a small market town in Lower Austria, and like hundreds of similar municipalities it issued Notgeld during the acute coin shortage that gripped Austria in the final years of the First World War and its immediate aftermath. The 20 Heller denomination was among the most practical for small transactions — the sort of change that vanished from daily commerce first when metal was needed for the war effort.

Municipal Notgeld of this type was authorized under emergency provisions and redeemable locally. Most were printed in short runs by regional printers with limited equipment, which accounts for the considerable variation in paper quality found across surviving examples from the same issue.