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In autumn 1935 a new Marital Health Law was passed that forbade marriage if one of the parties suffered from a “mental disturbance.” Narcotics addicts were marginalized into this category and were branded as “psychopathic personalities”—without the prospect of a cure. This marriage prohibition was supposed to prevent “infection of the partner, as well as hereditarily conditioned potential for addiction” in children, because among “the descendants of drug addicts an increased rate of mental deviations” had been observed.28 The Law for the Prevention of Hereditarily Diseased Offspring took compulsory sterilization to its brutal conclusion: “For reasons of racial hygiene we must therefore see to it that severe addicts are prevented from reproducing.”29
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