Siegfried Braun and the First Austrian Cripple Working Group
By Volker Schönwiese and Angela Wegscheider As an organiser of self-help groups and a political activist, Siegfried Braun (1893-1944) co-founded the Erste Österreichische Krüppelarbeitsgemeinschaft (First Austrian Cripple Working Group), a disabled people’s organisation oriented towards emancipation and social rights. In 1943, the Nazis deported Braun, identified as an Austrian-Czech Jew, to the Theresienstadt ghetto. He was murdered in Auschwitz in 1944. Portrait of Siegfried Braun, Chairman of the Cripple Working Group Source: Illustrierte Kronen-Zeitung, 17/12/1926, 7 The contemporary disability rights campaigns are influenced by and embedded in historical processes and narratives. Siegfried Braun was a key agent of an early disability advocacy movement. Sharing his story can be considered as a “usable past” in understanding the present and building a different future (Longmore 2003). By using archive material, among other media-coverage of Braun and his group in the 1920s and