“Don’t forget about self-help” the fight for disability rights in Austria in the 1920s and 1930s

Abstract

As an organiser of self-help groups and a political activist, Austrian-Czech Jew Siegfried Braun (1893-1944) co-founded the early social movement oriented towards emancipation and internationality of persons with disabilities in Austria. In the 1920s, he co-founded the First Austrian Cripple Working Group, a self-help organisation. The aim of Braun and his colleagues was to move away from being considered objects of charity–a role imposed by the Austrian welfare policy. The organisation did not only demand compliance with contemporary equal and human rights but also actively organised peer counselling, representation, and regular employment in their own businesses. In the 1930s, Braun maintained an active and reflexive role despite the economically and politically difficult times leading to National Socialism. After 1938, he was deported to the Theresienstadt concentration camp and ghetto (today Terezín Memorial), where he organised educational programmes as a form of resistance, before he was murdered in Auschwitz.