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As early as 1919 the Social Democrats founded the Hauptausschuss für Arbeiterwohlfahrt (Main Committee for Worker’s Welfare / AWO) as a social support organisation with the aim of no longer allowing workers to be solely the object of bourgeois poor relief. The AWO was created to strengthen the workers’ self help. The expansion was rapid: By the mid-1920’s the new organisation already had 5,000 facilities including about 1,000 stationary institutions with approximately 60,000 beds and 6,000 staff.

It took however until 1926 until a professional national journal was founded. Marie Juchacz (1897–1956), founder and for many years chairwoman of the AWO, remarked in the introduction to the journal Arbeiterwohlfahrt that the AWO required its own mouthpiece not only for an exchange of opinions and experience between its voluntary and professional workers on the problems of welfare but also as a forum for the communication for legal and organisational matters in the social area. To Juchacz the journal served also as a necessary fighting platform: «The leaders of the confessional welfare associations use the fact that the AWO does not possess a journal in order to preserve and strengthen its position of power to the disadvantage of the socialist point of view, through real and apparent fundamental statements of opinion.»

This statement stresses the outsider status of the AWO. Avoided by the bourgeois and confessional associations for political reasons it was the only major association which was not a member of the League of Non-Statutory Welfare. Therefore the journal enriches the spectrum of the welfare journals from an important critical perspective.

The structure of the individual issues is similar to the other professional journals in this field. Fundamental socio-political reports are followed by reports of practical experience, reports from the association and its subdivisions and a bookreview and journal presentation. Hedwig Wachenheim (1891–1969), the director of the first AWO welfare school, was the Chief editor. Lotte Lemke, also a professional welfare worker and director of the AWO since 1930, edited the journal from mid 1931 until March 1933.

The articles reflect the professional and socio-political changes in the Weimar Republic from the socialist point of view. The main concern of those in charge was to train and teach the professional workers who increasingly established themselves in the field of social work during the Republic. The journal Arbeiterwohlfahrt was intended to shape their socialist view.

In the spring of 1933 the National Socialists banned the AWO, and its institutions were either dissolved or taken over by the NSV. The 14th and final issue of the year 1933 appeared with a swastika on the title page. This bears witness to the unsuccessful attempt by the German Labour Front to integrate the AWO as a conforming part into the Labour front and to continue the journal as a NS publication. But there was no room for a second national socialist welfare organisation along side the NSV.