Disabled in Germany Face Antagonism and Violence

Guenter Schirmer was enjoying an autumn afternoon with his wife and cocker spaniel when the teen-agers mobbed them near the market square of their small Lower Saxony town. “Under Hitler, you would have been gassed!” the youths yelled. “You’re a waste of taxpayers’ money!”

They kicked at Schirmer and spat on him. When they finally left, the 46-year-old amputee assured his shaken wife, Irene, that it hadn’t been so bad this time. Only then did she learn that he had been thrown down subway station stairs by neo-Nazis, that cruel taunts and abuse had become common.

After that humiliating afternoon sitting on his special three-wheel bike covered with spit, Schirmer stopped going outside, his wife later recalled. Two weeks later, he killed himself with an overdose of pills.

“Handicapped people have no chance at all in this world,” his suicide note reportedly declared. “Under Hitler I would have surely been gassed; maybe all these kids have a point.”

Friends from a disabled self-help club in Grossburgwedel would later explain that Guenter Schirmer had learned to live without a leg--and with the speech impairment that also stemmed from his 1979 automobile accident. But when his dignity was taken away, they said, Schirmer could not bear to go on.

His death late last year was not an isolated tragedy; rather it is one of many shocking cases in a list of atrocities against those perceived as society’s most vulnerable members. Even more troubling than the physical assaults, watchdog groups here say, is an undercurrent of public resentment and official neglect of citizens in a country that barely 40 years ago would have systematically murdered them.

“Segregation and disempowerment already killed our disabled brothers and sisters during the Third Reich, and we won’t watch silently a second time,” said Uwe Frehse of the European Network on Independent Living.

“We will fight for our rights and our self-determination,” he declared in a recent statement.

As the European Community launches a week of protests and demonstrations beginning today to demand equality and anti-discrimination laws for the disabled, Germany is caught in the spotlight.

“Germany is becoming a prison for handicapped people,” warned Horst Illeger, whose Kiel-based National Forum on Violence Against the Disabled began documenting attacks six months ago and currently tallies 80.

The cases reported range from threatening phone calls received by parents of handicapped children to wheelchairs being overturned to brutal murder. They include:

* Bruno Kappi, mildly retarded and nearly blind, was stomped to death last December on the way to his bus stop by two skinheads, aged 16 and 20; prosecutors later concluded that the skinheads “considered the disabled unworthy of life.”

* Five deaf 14-year-olds waiting for a bus were attacked last June by a gang of 10 older youths enraged when they failed to answer the taunts they could not hear. The bus driver and passengers reportedly watched passively as the attackers beat the youngsters; one suffered a serious skull injury.

* In Kassel, a 13-year-old boy removed a retarded man’s T-shirt, doused it with gasoline, persuaded the 55-year-old victim to put it back on, then set him afire. The man survived the incident last August with serious burns.

“There’s always been verbal violence, but it was hidden and covered up,” Illeger said. “Now it’s out in the open, and physical violence is taking place in public in full view of eyewitnesses who do nothing.

“In Kiel, people gathered around and applauded when a disabled person was being heckled by kids saying, ‘You should be gassed.’ A lot of people are afraid to report such incidents,” he added. “Our list of 80 cases is surely not complete.”

Besides the sensational cases that come to light, activists point to everyday discrimination against the disabled and callous disregard for their civil rights.

Slowly becoming more politicized but still poorly organized, people with disabilities are demanding that Germany enact constitutional guarantees of equality and anti-discrimination laws modeled after the Americans With Disabilities Act. That 1990 American legislation protects the disabled from discrimination in employment, public accommodations, transportation and telecommunications.

About 10% of Germany’s 80 million people are handicapped, and while the “social net” is considered sturdy, more and more disabled are coming forward to say it is acceptance, equality and dignity they want--not welfare benefits.

“We don’t have real rights here,” said Ottmar Miles-Paul, a 28-year-old visually impaired activist for a Kassel-based umbrella group, the Center on Self-Determined Living. “We get charity.”

Friedhelm Ochel, a Cologne counselor for the same organization, added: “They’re discussing changing the constitution anyway to cover a number of things since unification. Now is the time to add disabled rights as well.”

Like many people in wheelchairs, Ochel tends to avoid public transportation because most buses have difficult steps and most subway stations lack elevators or wheelchair ramps. Even worse, he says, is that wheelchair passengers must routinely ride in baggage cars of even the newest, most modern trains, because doors and aisles are not wide enough for them.

This is part of what Ochel calls the “daily violence” of life with a disability in Germany, of having to plead or fight for what should be a simple right, “of always having to prove what I need,” whether it’s a state-subsidized helper or a curb-cut at crosswalks.

“Many people are staying home out of fear now,” he said in a telephone interview, “and they have lost the confidence to go out in public.”

Miles-Paul has heard from many disabled who are fearful not just of the skinheads and neo-Nazis but of “normal” people as well. The Kassel activist himself encountered this animosity when he tried to purchase a plot in a gardening colony with a blind friend and another friend in a wheelchair. They were denied admission on grounds they wouldn’t garden properly, Miles-Paul said. When they fought the decision publicly, the plot’s cottage was burned to the ground.

Peter Werner, 52, is a Berlin fund-raiser and activist in the disabled movement. The former Olympic gymnast and wrestler has been in a wheelchair since a spinal tap left him paralyzed 15 years ago.

“As a disabled person, you’re more or less treated as a second-class citizen,” he said. “You pay full price for a ticket but now and then end up in the baggage car like just another package.”

Werner, a Dutch native, became a celebrity when he rolled across the United States in his wheelchair several years ago, raising millions of dollars for disabled causes.

In Germany, he towed four light planes--3.9 tons--in his wheelchair on a television game show to raise more money. His goal now is to stage a 100-day race between Berlin and Potsdam to raise money for a youth center in eastern Berlin to get skinheads, neo-Nazis and other aimless kids “off the streets.”

He figures his muscular build and proven strength have prevented him from becoming a target of violence by the very groups he now is devoted to helping. “I tell them I’m not afraid of them--’If you want to punch me, go ahead, I’ll punch you back,’ ” Werner said. “That’s the only language they understand.”

Disabled activists note a rise in the number of self-defense courses for the handicapped and rumors that more and more handicapped people are arming themselves with gas pistols and cattle prods.

But becoming more assertive and self-confident is only half the battle, members of the disabled community say. “We must teach sensitivity,” Werner said. “It’s just not there.”

The most notorious proof came last summer in the northern city of Flensburg, where a judge awarded damages to a family who sued a travel agent for booking them into a Turkish hotel where handicapped people also were staying. The family won a 10% rebate for being exposed to what the judge agreed was the “nauseating” sight of 10 severely handicapped guests eating in the public dining room.

“They were bound to their wheelchairs and had to be fed and watered,” the couple explained in an interview with the Sueddeutsche Zeitung magazine, which agreed not to identify them.

“There was a lot of splattering, so that most of their meal ended up running onto the table and floor,” they were quoted as saying. “We have nothing against the handicapped. . . . Guests should be clued in beforehand that seriously handicapped people might be in the hotel, so they can prepare themselves or make different reservations.”

Andreas Juergens, a district court judge in Kassel who is disabled, criticized the Flensburg verdict in an interview with the Stuttgarter Nachrichten newspaper. The ruling put disabled people “on the same level as defective plumbing, construction noise and polluted beaches,” Juergens said.

Christoph Nachtigaeller, lobbyist for an umbrella group representing some 650,000 disabled Germans, fears that the country’s recession and concerns over the high costs of rebuilding eastern Germany will take their toll. “It has an effect on the citizens when the state places different values on different people,” he said.

Even the federal government ignores its own rules regarding employment of the handicapped, according to the VdK, the largest organization representing disabled, elderly and wounded veterans. Some 150,000 employers in Germany fall under rules stating that 6% of jobs in publicly funded offices with more than 16 employees must be filled with disabled people, according to VdK manager Ulrich Laschet.

Only 25% fulfill the quota, he said, and the rest “buy out” their obligation with minimal fines that go toward caring for the disabled. The federal government and 15 of 16 states pay millions in fines each year rather than fulfill the quota, Laschet said.

“It’s not even legally required for new buildings to have access for the handicapped,” he said. “It’s recommended that whatever is built with public funds be accessible, but it’s not the law.

“Technically, everything is possible. We have the solutions, and accessibility serves everyone,” he added. “A mother with a baby in the stroller has trouble using an escalator too, and so does someone with their leg in a cast.

“It’s not so much to ask to put light switches at a standard height so people in wheelchairs can reach them. Architects tell us that even in the most extreme cases, it would only add 3% to the cost of a building to make it free of barriers for the handicapped.”

In Kiel, Horst Illeger agrees that the attitude is one of “not what we can accomplish, but what we have to do,” and he worries when the talk turns to costs.

“There’s this climate now where integration and the human dignity of the disabled are in question,” he said. “There is even a study analyzing the costs per year of caring for a handicapped person and how much could be saved by prenatal diagnosis and abortion.”

The respected news weekly Der Spiegel cited a doctoral thesis along those lines, without naming the author or the university. According to Der Spiegel, the thesis concluded that the state could save about 7.3 million marks ($4.5 million) in care and special schools for “each handicapped child not born” and tallied a potential 730 billion marks ($450 billion) in government savings if 100,000 “genetically damaged” babies were aborted.

“That’s the real scary part,” said Miles-Paul, “when talk turns to how much a disabled person costs and whether this society can bear the expense.”

Illeger agreed, saying: “It’s disgusting. Another study figured that testing all pregnant women over the age of 38 would cost just one-quarter of what it costs to care for a child with Down’s syndrome.”

German groups representing the disabled are traditionally “very conservative,” he added. “In America, these kinds of things wouldn’t happen without the disabled doing something about it themselves. We don’t need anymore silent vigils here. I don’t need people standing around with a candle and then going home.

“I need movement. I need people on the street.”

Miles-Paul sadly agrees that righteousness is still alien to most disabled Germans, a failing he considers partly cultural. “There is a saying that if Germans were to stage a revolution at a train station,” he said, “they’d buy tickets beforehand.”