1926–1938: The “First Austrian Cripple Working Group”

The history of the disability rights movement in Austria is closely linked to the history of the First Austrian Cripple Working Group (Erste österreichischen Krüppelarbeitsgemeinschaft, or KAG). As a self-help movement for people with physical disabilities (or “cripples” in the language of the time), the group became well known through media coverage and its journal "Der Krüppel" (1927-1938).

The first chair of the KAG was Siegfried Braun. He founded the KAG in 1926 as an advocacy organisation for people with physical disabilities who did not have social insurance. The aim of the group was to alleviate the hardship experienced by “cripples” through self-help and their own efforts, and to help resolve the “cripple problem”. Looking back, Braun wrote of his motives for founding the organisation that in 1913, due to a lack of support, he had been forced to move into a care home in Lainz: “I was overcome with despair. I said to myself: ‘All right, I’ll go to the infirmary, but first I’ll set up a scheme that, if possible, will spare other cripples years of searching and then arriving too late to receive help.’” (Der Krüppel, 9/10 1934, 37-38)

By establishing an advocacy group, the hope was to influence government policy with a view to securing a federal “Cripple Welfare Act” modelled on international examples. With the exception of a few individual institutions, there was no functioning federal “cripple welfare” system in Austria at that time. Families were responsible for funding “cripple welfare”. In cases of destitution, this responsibility fell to the local poor relief authorities or to church institutions run along strict monastic lines. All of this was based on the principles of right of residence (Heimatrecht) and case-by-case assessment (in accordance with the Right of Residence Act of 1863), which minimised the federal government’s responsibility.

At that time, people with disabilities faced great hardship due to poverty and unemployment. In response, the KAG took a typical self-help approach and set up several self-organised workshops (in Vienna and St. Pölten). This created jobs and demonstratively proved the ability of “cripples” to work and be productive. Ultimately, 60 work and training places in the workshops were financed through donations and the sale of products. All this took place in the knowledge that setting up workshops could only be “a drop in the ocean” (Der Krüppel 1 1928, 1). Advice, internal welfare support, further training, fostering contacts among members, job placement, operating the workshops and campaigning to secure legislative improvements were the core activities of the KAG (cf. Der Krüppel, 3/4 1937, 10–20).

In light of political developments in Austria during the interwar period, the collapse of the First Republic, the ban on the Social Democratic Party, the civil war and the establishment of the Dollfuß–Schuschnigg dictatorship, the KAG increasingly scaled back its objectives.

Following the Anschluss (“annexation”) in 1938, the KAG was incorporated without resistance into the Reich League of the Physically Disabled as part of the National Socialist People’s Welfare (NSV). The campaign for work became a duty to be productive and contribute to the Volksgemeinschaft" (“people’s community”), now coupled with a eugenic programme of sterilisation, selection and murder aimed at the extermination of people who were labelled “less productive”.

Der Krüppel. Gesamtausgabe (1927–1938).

Volker Schönwiese und Angela Wegscheider, “Don’t forget about self-help” the fight for disability rights in Austria in the 1920s and 1930s, in: Disability & Society, 38/6 (2021), 1009–1028.

Volker Schönwiese, Geschichte der Behindertenbewegung. Selbstbestimmt Leben Bewegung in Österreich, in: Gottfried Biewer und Michelle Proyer (Hg.), Behinderung und Gesellschaft. Ein universitärer Beitrag zum Gedenkjahr, Wien 2019, 72–84.

Stimme. Zeitschrift der Initiative Minderheiten, Spezialausgabe: Selbstbestimmt Leben. 100 Jahre Behindertenbewegung,  Nr. 115 (2020).