Early state socialism and eugenics: Premarital medical certificates in Czechoslovakia,East Germany,and Poland in the aftermath of World War II

Introduction

Shortly after the end of World War II, despite the deadly consequences of the Nazi eugenic laws, debates on eugenic measures re-emerged in the countries of East-Central Europe. The new post-war authorities were engaged in population and health policies to overcome the negative demographic consequences of the war. In this article, we discuss the debates on the partial introduction and eventual rejection of premarital medical certificates in Czechoslovakia, the Soviet Occupied Zone (SOZ; East Germany from 1949), and Poland in the early post-war years (1945–50). We show that while the idea of premarital medical certificates remained popular between 1945 and 1948, the consolidation of power by the communists curtailed the debates and contributed to the rejection of the certificates regulating marriage by the early 1950s. Through our examination of this public health measure, we provide an in-depth comparative analysis of the eugenic debates in three countries, contributing to the scholarly discussion on the history of eugenic ideas and policies under state socialism.

This article is focused on expert discourses, analysing how they were mobilized by state officials during policymaking. Different kinds of expertise, including medical and legal, influenced ministerial deliberations. We consider how various actors constructed their arguments for or against premarital medical examinations, showing which arguments prevailed immediately after the war and which took over later. We discuss similarities and differences in national trajectories, accounting for the Nazi past in Germany and revealing the crucial role of transnational contacts in rejecting premarital medical certificates in Czechoslovakia and Poland.

In all three countries, state and health officials raised eugenic arguments after the end of the war, when population and health issues were of utmost concern. We argue that eugenics still lingered during the immediate post-war period. However, the eugenicists’ aim was preventive (‘how to spare the offspring from heritable diseases’), rather than negative (‘how to eliminate the undesirable’) or positive (‘how to build a superhuman’) in racialized terms. Marital certificates were legally introduced in Poland; in Germany, although most Nazi regulations were lifted at the (preliminary) state level, local officials partially re-enacted these measures regionally; and in Czechoslovakia, marital certificates were repeatedly proposed but never put into practice. For all three countries, however, the marital certificate policy was rejected at some point between 1949 and 1952. Only in Poland did discussions about premarital medical certificates re-emerge after 1956, though the measures were never reintroduced. Surprisingly, this shows the Stalinist state at the height of its power consolidation as a polity removing a limitation to people's freedom to marry; the de-Stalinization of Poland provides an example of political relaxation, opening the possibility of eugenic restrictions.

We have built our analysis on comparable source material. For Poland, we have drawn on archival documents from the ministries of health and justice, related documents from other governmental bodies, press discussions by experts, and expert literature. Similarly, our sources for Czechoslovakia include medical journals (Praktický lékař) and archival documents from the ministries of health and justice. For East Germany, the investigation uses information from ministries and local authorities such as doctors and health officials.

We start by discussing the current state of research for the study of eugenics in East-Central Europe and trace the pre-1945 history of premarital medical certificates. In the main part, we first investigate the early post-war discussion and (non)implementation of premarital medical examinations and certificates in the three countries. Second, we analyse the 1949–52 shift that led to the rejection of this eugenic measure. Finally, we explore the re-emergence of the discussion on premarital certificates in post-Stalinist Poland.

State of research

The proponents of premarital medical examinations and certificates understood them as one of the tools to ensure a healthy population in the future. Tracing the debates that surrounded this measure and its (non-)implementation gives insight into the shift from ideas that had persisted since the late 19th century. While we do not argue that all eugenic thinking disappeared once and for all, we see it as consequential that a specific eugenic measure was not implemented. We consider it relevant that this abrupt shift occurred after a regime change.

The history of eugenics is long. Francis Galton, who is considered the founder of Social Darwinism and thus eugenics, defined its aims as ‘rational planning of, and intervention into, human breeding’ (Bashford and Levine, 2012: 5). His ideas emerged in close connection with shifting debates in the social sciences and manifesting social concerns about a nation's ‘fitness’ (Renwick, 2011). Historians tend to understand eugenics very broadly, including all ideas and practices meant to impact human reproduction in order to ‘improve’ or ‘impair’ certain groups, prioritizing the perceived good of the collective over the rights of individuals (Dikötter, 1998: 469; Turda, 2022: 2474). According to the authors of the Oxford Handbook of the History of Eugenics, the aim of eugenics ‘was to affect reproductive practice through the application of theories of heredity’. Eugenic practices thus included measures to ‘prevent life’, ‘bring about fitter life’, ‘generate more life’, or ‘end life’ (Bashford and Levine, 2012: 3). However, post-World War II ‘population planning’ is only sometimes included in the complex and broad category of eugenics (ibid.: 12). From the proposed categorization of eugenic policies by Bashford and Levine, it might appear that the premarital medical examinations and certificates discussed in the article only fall into the category of ‘preventing life’. They were meant to identify people who were deemed ‘unfit’ to marry and reproduce: the ‘negative’ eugenic approach. However, state and health authorities usually presented medical certificates as ‘positive’ eugenics because they would encourage ‘healthy’ couples to marry and reproduce for the good of society.

The goal of creating healthy offspring by allowing only ‘fit’ couples to marry is not unique to Nazi ideas or socialist countries. Eugenic movements across the world expressed ‘strong support for marriage counselling and the physical and mental screening of intending couples before marriage’ (Bashford and Levine, 2012: 6). Such measures were discussed in many countries from the early 20th century and implemented in some of them, including in Connecticut in 1896 and Soviet Russia in 1926 (Promitzer, 2006: 243–4; Tanner, 2012: 465). Multiple variants of ‘eugenics’ from different political movements and motivations have existed since their arrival in the late 19th century, and they became increasingly popularized during the interwar period.

Therefore, historians agree that eugenics was a ‘key expression of modernity’ that marked the whole of the 20th century, influencing both right-wing and leftist minds (Bashford and Levine, 2012: 14; Turda, 2022: 2472). Marius Turda argues that despite the post-1945 ‘near-universal condemnation of eugenics’, its ideas and arguments persisted (Turda, 2022: 2474). For example, debates on birth control included eugenic arguments, clashing with the discourse on disability rights, as recently discussed by Dagmar Herzog (Herzog, 2018). Apart from Germany, many Western European countries experienced an uninterrupted development of eugenic thinking, from 1945 until the protest movements of 1968 advocating universal human rights. The core idea remained the improvement of the ‘white, “Europoid” race’, without using the term eugenics, as part of the development of the social welfare state, often targeting minorities in the respective countries (Tanner, 2012: 472). However, eugenic ideas continued to exist after 1968, even to the present day. Jürgen Habermas frames these as ‘liberal eugenics’, describing a shift from state-enforced policies to ‘individual self-responsibility’ alongside advances in medicine and prenatal diagnostics (Argast, 2012: 455–7). In the countries of East-Central Europe, where the eugenic movement had developed from the early 20th century in the context of nation-building and where communists took power after 1945, a similar development is visible. However, there is much less research on the states to the east of the Iron Curtain than there is on the Western world and countries of the Global South (Turda, 2015; Turda and Weindling, 2006). Turda points out the adaptation of eugenic ideas under communism, especially in countries where the Roma were believed to be ‘culturally inferior’ and ‘naturally’ predisposed to ‘criminality, vagrancy, and indolence’ (Turda, 2022: 2474). In this way, scholars encourage connecting the research on eugenics in the region to the history of European colonialism and racism (Turda and Balogun, 2023). One of the most important contributions to the discussion on eugenic ideas under state socialism is a recent collection of articles edited by Dorottya Szikra and Eszter Varsa. In their introduction, the editors illustrate the continuity of eugenic thinking in the policies advocating for the ‘quality’ of the offspring and ‘healthy’ birth by promoting the fertility of selected groups, in the discourse around abortion, and in anti-Roma discourses and policies (Varsa and Szikra, 2020). More importantly, they point to the continuity of organizations and professionals that contributed to the long life of eugenics under communism. Among the specific characteristics of East-Central Europe, they note three features:

the replacement of overt racism with covert forms of racial discrimination that in several post-war contexts explicitly targeted Roma; the importance of transnational professional connections ensuring the transfer of eugenic ideas in family planning; and finally, the adaptation of eugenics to Marxist ideology and state socialism. (ibid.: 538)

Various authors have addressed the persistence of eugenic ideas in post-war Czechoslovakia, Germany, and Poland. On the example of Czechoslovakia, Hana Hašková and Radka Dudová claim that while state policies concerning abortion, assisted reproduction, prenatal screening, and childcare support were always pro-natalist, they were selective, discriminating particularly against Roma women (Hašková and Dudová, 2020). During late socialism, scores of Roma women were sterilized without their consent (Albert and Szilvasi, 2017; Marks, 2017). Although sterilization in post-war Poland remained illegal, historian Sylwia Kuźma-Markowska shows an important continuity between the interwar period and the persistence of sterilization in the expert discourse on family planning after 1956 (Kuźma-Markowska, 2011). These debates continued even though the Polish Eugenic Society was dissolved in the early 1950s, as discussed by Magdalena Gawin (Gawin, 2018). Recently, Jakub Gałęziowski has discussed ‘the need for eugenics’ as a motivation in the early post-war abortion policy in cases of war rapes in Poland (Gałęziowski, 2022). In the SOZ in Germany, the governmental bodies allowed abortion in cases of rape by Soviet soldiers, which, according to Atina Grossmann, indicates the persistence of eugenic concepts in the post-war period – even by the affected women themselves, who used racial and eugenic terminology to make a case for their right to abort (Grossmann, 1995: 57). In a case study in post-war Berlin, Annette Timm has shown that, especially in the western sector, authorities reintroduced marriage counselling centres with an emphasis on medical screening in the form of premarital certificates. Resistance came from the officials on site; after passing the Basic Law (constitution), which enshrined basic human rights, the premarital medical certificates became illegal (Timm, 1998: 197–203). However, Livia Prüll shows how doctors in West Germany also warned the public against marrying a person with diabetes – blatantly continuing Nazi rhetoric after 1945. This persistence in attitudes was partly due to the incomplete denazification of the medical profession in all four occupied zones of Germany (Prüll, 2012). In East Germany, however, state officials feared any connection with the recent past. For this reason, as Stefan Jehne discusses in his current dissertation project, authorities usually denied requests for sterilizations in East Germany. Only in 1969 did they introduce a law that allowed the sterilization of women in rare and strictly medically induced cases (Jehne, in press). The same is true for the law that allowed abortions in 1972 and was, as Donna Harsch shows, popularized under a pronatalist agenda (Harsch, 1997).

The picture emerging from the growing, yet still scarce, literature on eugenics in post-war East-Central Europe can be further enhanced by looking at eugenic measures and the debates around them, as well as at similarities and differences within the Eastern bloc. As Turda has recently claimed, substantial comparative research can advance the study of continuities and discontinuities in the history of eugenics in the region (Turda, 2022: 2475). We aim to contribute here to this line of research.

Premarital health certificates before 1945

To contextualize our findings for the post-war period, we briefly illustrate the discussions of eugenic measures after the beginning of the 20th century. This context supports the argument that professionals trained during the first half of the 20th century would not just ‘forget’ eugenic and racial hygiene ideas overnight. Instead, in all three countries, there were people – professionals, politicians, and ordinary individuals – who may have rejected Nazi legislation and racism, but whose work was still heavily affected by their socialization, training, and pre-1945 concepts of how to control and ‘improve’ populations.

In Poland, premarital medical certificates were debated for the first time in 1909. In the 1920s, the idea was also advocated outside of the eugenic movement (Gawin, 2018: 142–3). A draft of eugenic laws from 1934, published in the Polish journal of eugenicists, included sterilization and the establishment of premarital clinics that would issue medical certificates. Sterilization was widely and heatedly debated in the 1930s, but Polish authorities opposed the introduction of eugenic laws (ibid.: 237–59).

Czechoslovakia was marked by repeatedly failed efforts to introduce premarital medical certificates. In 1918, when the sovereign state was founded, a ‘population theorist’ came up with suggested pro-population measures for the new republic. A 14-point plan included ‘introducing health certificates before marriage as a tool to fight venereal disease and genetic degeneration’ (Rákosník and Šustrová, 2016: 18). ¹ However, as Radka Šustrová and Jakub Rákosník show, these were never introduced thanks to historically low sympathies for Malthusian thinking in the Czech lands. Despite one of the lowest European birth rates in both pre-World War I and interwar Europe, and the prominent standing of pro-populationists, interwar Czechoslovakia never adopted any concise population plan (ibid.: 18–31). Yet the state strove for such a policy, and historians argue that across vastly different ideologies there is evident continuity in the state's efforts (Jakobyová, 2023; Lacinová Najmanová, 2021; Rákosník and Šustrová, 2018).

As in Poland and Czechoslovakia, the idea of premarital medical certificates in Germany was a common feature of intellectual and political debates from the turn of the century. However, they were never introduced. A form of ‘monitoring marriages’ was the novel marriage and sexual counselling centres, which were widely introduced due to the influence of Alfred Blaschko and Magnus Hirschfeld and the sexual reform movement in general during the Weimar Republic. Apart from their revolutionary character, offering a platform for discussing sex and relationship issues, marital counselling had already shifted more towards racial and eugenic approaches by the end of the 1920s. The potential candidates were voluntarily assessed and screened for genetic diseases. In the Third Reich, intrusion into people's lives and choices of sexual and marital partners was written into the law by 1935 (Ellabrand, 1999: 219–20). Despite this law, the requirement of premarital medical certificates issued to the spouses by the health administration office was hardly implemented due to the lack of doctors and public aversion. The health administration got involved only in ‘questionable’ cases, which often led to the sterilization of people with hereditary diseases (Timm, 1998: 197).

In the following section, our article analyses discussions and considerations of premarital medical certificates that re-emerged in post-war Czechoslovakia, East Germany, and Poland. As we show, the debates were limited to public health concerns (epidemics, diseases) and demographic rebuilding (post-war pronatalism) and did not include racist considerations.

1945–8: Persistence of eugenic ideas

The early post-war debates on premarital medical certificates show similarities among the three national settings. While eugenic ideas persisted, there were considerable differences in both the argumentation and implementation of this public health policy.

In Poland, medical certificates were formally introduced in 1945. The decree on marriage, which legalized civil marriage and divorce, specified that candidates for marriage needed to present a ‘medical certificate proving that there are no obstacles as mentioned in article 7, point 6’. This article stipulated that candidates with a mental illness, contagious venereal disease, or tuberculosis, or who were ‘mentally underdeveloped’, were not allowed to get married. ² The state justified such restrictions by their interest that ‘required a healthy family and healthy young generation’ (Fiedorczyk, 2014: 41). The immediate post-war situation in public health was perceived as catastrophic. Historians estimate that in 1945 around 5% of the population of Poland was infected with tuberculosis, and the number of people freshly infected with syphilis reached 100,000 that year (Barański, 2012: 92; Zaremba, 2012: 540). However, the new law was to be enforced only when the Ministry of Justice issued an executive ordinance; this measure was adopted because premarital medical examinations would have been difficult to implement due to a post-war shortage of medical doctors. ³

The idea of premarital check-ups was strongly promoted by the Polish Eugenic Society, led by venerologist Leon Wernic, one of the leaders of the Polish eugenic movement since the early 20th century and an advocate of premarital certificates (Gawin, 2018: 76–7). The society pushed the ministries to proceed with the new law. Magdalena Gawin, a historian of the Polish eugenic movement, has shown very strong personal connections between the society (reactivated after World War II) and high officials in the Ministry of Health. For example, the deputy minister Tadeusz Michejda was also a Eugenic Society member (ibid.: 275–6). The society organized lectures and prepared detailed instructions for medical doctors, including indications in which a patient should not be allowed to marry and a certificate template. The focus of this material was venereal diseases and hereditary diseases. ⁴ Wernic opened a eugenic counselling centre in Warsaw shortly after the war. The fees for his services were covered by social security. The press regularly advertised the centre and informed the public that medical examinations were compulsory (‘Eugeniczne poradnie przedślubne’, 1948). ‘One visit prevents the degeneration of offspring’, claimed an anonymous journalist (‘Nie lękać się oględzin lekarskich’, 1948).

The objective of the premarital medical examination was to prevent the spread of illnesses. The health concerns of experts in eugenics who supported premarital certificates included a broad scope of diseases. In the Warsaw-based counselling centre, a ‘eugenicist’ checked patients for ‘venereal, sexual, and mental disease, and tuberculosis’ (‘Czy jesteście zdrowi’, 1947). Instructions for medical doctors suggested that they should not allow any person with these diseases to marry. In some cases, however, the marriage was only to be postponed until the end of treatment. In addition to epidemic concerns, the Eugenic Society wanted to restrict the procreation of people showing signs of hereditary diseases, mental illnesses and ‘sexual deviance’ (‘Kurs eugeniki’, 1948).

The discourse on sexually transmitted infections (STIs) became linked with population decline (caused by infertility as a consequence of the diseases) and the ‘degeneration of children’. ⁵ Medical doctor and public health expert Marcin Kacprzak argued,

We perfectly know that venereal diseases harm the very foundations of the existence of the Nation, because these are degenerating and depopulating diseases. Depopulation is a consequence of infertility, miscarriage, stillbirth, short life of those born.… Not less dangerous is the physical and mental degeneration, as a consequence of infections passed from parents to children, the innocent victims of the sins of the fathers. Very often, degenerated offspring of syphilitics become a burden for the whole society and inhibit its development.… The biological defence of the value of the Nation must be prioritized. ⁶

As this quote shows, in the discourse about the STIs, pronatalist ideas of the demographic rebuilding of the Polish nation after the war met with eugenic concepts about securing the health of future generations. These discussions were connected to mental illness, and the inclusion of alcoholism and prostitution broadened and strengthened the scope of eugenic arguments. However, explicit references to the (ethnically understood) Polish nation, common in the post-war pro-natalist discourse, were rare in the debates on premarital certificates. In the end, the state introduced the certificates alongside its campaigns against STIs. For example, they prohibited sexual intercourse and marriage for infected people in 1946. Two years later, premarital check-ups became a requirement; a person infected with an STI had to undergo a compulsory treatment with the new drug penicillin (Barański, 2012: 27, 39).

Premarital certificates caused a dispute within the state administration in 1947 and 1948, for reasons that were practical rather than based on the open rejection of eugenic arguments. For example, in June 1947, the Ministry of Health urged the minister of justice to introduce the certificates. ⁷ In the same year, a ministry official and lawyer attended a series of lectures ‘On Premarital Counselling’, organized by the Polish Eugenic Society, after which he announced ‘an urgent need to prepare a ministerial ordinance’ to introduce obligatory certificates. ⁸ Also in 1947, medical certificates were discussed in the Parliamentary Commission of Health and Social Issues. Although this idea received broad support, discussants were rather sceptical about whether the state had adequate means to enforce this obligation. ⁹ The Ministry of Health created guidelines for regional head doctors. However, the Ministry of Justice was hesitant to act, and expressed the opinion that the certificates were ‘not a good solution’. They argued that due to great difficulties faced by the state in the implementation of civil marriages, the introduction of certificates could further discourage people from entering civil unions, introduced only in 1945. ¹⁰ Health officials pressed their view, arguing in late 1948 that 50,000 children were stillborn every year because of congenital syphilis. ¹¹ The ministerial ordinance never came into being, and the discussion moved to the transnational exchange among lawyers on a new family code. From 1945 to 1948, Polish ministries negotiated the implementation of the 1945 law on marriage but did not manage to overcome practical obstacles to introducing premarital medical certificates.

In the SOZ, Max Klesse, a medical doctor and the Head of the Preventive Healthcare Department at the Deutsche Zentralverwaltung des Gesundheitswesens in der sowjetischen Besatzungszone (German Central Administration for Healthcare in the SOZ, DZVGW), came to a similar conclusion as the Polish experts. He claimed that ‘war and commerce were, in the past as well as today, the driver of venereal diseases’. ¹² In his statement, Klesse identified two reasons for the increase in STIs: war and the resulting displacement of people, especially caused by bombardment, battle, incarceration, expulsion, and resettlement. ¹³ Counting over 200,000 new registered cases in 1946, Soviet and East German authorities faced high incidence rates of syphilis and gonorrhoea. ¹⁴ More important for post-war officials was that, for example, in Saxony in 1948, almost 40% of all new STIs occurred among 18-to-25-year-olds – the most fertile population cohort and the proclaimed future of the socialist state. ¹⁵ Like Kacprzak in Poland, the SOZ authorities recognized this development and other rapidly spreading diseases as a threat to reproduction and the construction of a socialist society and state.

The situation regarding premarital medical certificates in the SOZ thus had some parallels to Poland and Czechoslovakia but with important distinctions. The shadow of the recent Nazi past shaped the policies in the immediate post-war period. In this vein, the Sowjetische Militäradministration in Deutschland (Soviet Military Administration of Germany, SMAD) abolished the 1935 ‘Law for the Protection of the Hereditary Health of the German People’, which prohibited the marriage of people with infectious diseases, undesirable psychological illnesses, or assumed hereditary medical conditions (‘Gesetz zum Schutze der Erbgesundheit des deutschen Volkes’, 1935). This law was still valid in West Germany until 1961, if only formally (‘Familienrechtsänderungsgesetz’, 1961). However, on both sides – East and West Germany – the eugenic language did not disappear. Instead, it was still ingrained in the everyday practices and the attitudes of local health officials, doctors, and the public – with a profound impact on the people affected.

The persistent attitudes surrounding STIs in the post-war era also influenced the discussions regarding marriages and premarital medical certificates. After the abolishment of the Nazi law by the SMAD, the administrations of many federal states in the SOZ demanded regulations regarding contagious diseases. ¹⁶ However, the Soviet and East German state officials hesitated, which led to arbitrary regulations in the federal states. In Brandenburg, for example, the administration sent out an edict to all provincial councils and mayors in February 1946, ordering their registrars to question all people who wanted to marry regarding contagious diseases. If a medical condition was present, they were to be sent to the health department. The administration, however, made clear that ‘of course, the [marital] counselling must be given in an absolutely appropriate way, without coercion of the betrothed and without talking about hereditary diseases’. ¹⁷ The struggle of the authorities between the predicaments of the post-war epidemics and the shadow of the Nazi past visible in this statement also applies to the reintroduced marital and sexual counselling centres. In the guidelines for these institutions, distributed in July 1946, state officials emphasized the change of direction from the nationalist ideology to the ‘ethics of a healthy and natural motherhood without a military policy end goal [emphasis as in the original].’ Instead, positive population policies should guide all counselling in these centres, supporting the will to live and to have a child. ¹⁸

However, other authorities pushed for strict marital regulations, as they were already in place for STIs and other infectious diseases. For example, in a letter to the state level at the end of 1948, Saxony-Anhalt's minister of internal affairs complained that marriages could neither be prevented nor delayed since the abolition of the 1935 marital health law. Due to the risk of the rapid spread of infectious diseases like tuberculosis and syphilis, he advocated for new rules to prevent ‘undesirable’ marriages. In his letter, he exposes his prejudices against people who are suffering from STIs and also against the ‘mentally disabled’, stating,

The same applies to marriage seekers who suffer from mental disorders or congenital imbecility, schizophrenia, severe hereditary physical deformity, or other hereditary diseases, and who, from experience, have inferior, mostly handicapped, or highly unemployable descendants, who are throughout a burden for public welfare or turn to crime. It is self-evident that from the outset, considerations of racial origins are exempt here. ¹⁹

While others explicitly excluded any hereditary diseases from their regulations to avoid any parallels being drawn to the Nazi past, the minister had no such scruples. In his statement, he referred to his past experiences when the state could intervene and prevent marriages, especially if the offspring were expected to suffer from avoidable hereditary medical conditions. In his eugenic thinking, he continued the idea that people with physical or mental disabilities would be a burden to society, particularly to the state budget. Despite his acknowledgment of the Nazi past and attempt to exclude racist considerations, he used the same standard arguments, claiming that these people would represent a burden to the state and ‘disrupt the democratic transformation’. ²⁰ Unsurprisingly, he was a proponent of marriage health certificates for future spouses. A similar procedure was introduced in Thuringia. State officials, however, always reacted and clarified that these regulations to delay or prevent marriages ‘lack any legal basis’. ²¹

Subsequently, the idea of preventing marriages of the so-called ‘undesirable’ was widespread in post-war East Germany. The state, however, hesitated. The socialist leadership feared the connection to Nazi regulations regarding marriages among its citizens. They also recognized that the spread of venereal diseases would not be stopped by simply forbidding marriages. ²² Therefore, they emphasized education and expanded the network of marriage counselling centres. These institutions were to ensure that partners ‘inform each other of their state of health before marriage, exchanging medical certificates if possible’. ²³ Nevertheless, many local East German officials continued to try to expand responsibilities in the name of protecting society from the ‘irresponsible individual’ and ‘dysfunctional families’. Thereby, they proved their persistent attitudes towards people with stigmatized medical conditions as inferior human beings.

In contrast to Poland, compulsory premarital medical check-ups were not introduced in Czechoslovakia. However, in the early post-war years, they were proposed and discussed, with eugenic imperatives strongly present in expert discourse and policymaking. In Czechoslovakia, the dominant framework of the debate was pronatalist measures, discussed mainly in the context of preventing contagious diseases, such as STIs or tuberculosis, from infecting the offspring.

In the immediate post-war period, pre-war discussions and concerns about population were undertaken again on expert and governmental levels. There was a clear personal continuity between the pre-war and post-war periods. The late 1930s work by the obstetrician František Pachner, entitled ‘The Issue of Offspring – The Issue of National Existence’ (‘Otázka potomstva – otázkou národního bytí’), was republished in the Czech medical journal Praktický lékař. In 1946, Pachner was behind the founding of the Population Commission of the Brno Land Committee. ²⁴ Pachner proposed various pronatalist measures to increase Czechoslovak population, but he claimed some groups should reproduce more:

Where the quantity is decreasing, the quality of the population is also decreasing, because it is the more sociologically qualified (the intellectual and wealthy classes) who limit their fertility more, whereas the lower social classes control their fertility less and the lowest social classes do not control it at all.… Thus, if the population growth in a territory decreases, the less able increase against the able, and the able ones have to take more and more care of the less able. The difficulties of the state in caring for the less able increase. (Pachner, 1945: 246)

In Pachner's view, candidates for marriage should be healthy, unburdened by hereditary illness or highly communicable and largely untreatable conditions such as tuberculosis or STI. Concerns over the population quality led Pachner to propose premarital medical counselling. Premarital counselling centres would ‘advise young people from the point of view of medicine and sociology if they can enter marriage without jeopardizing their physical and spiritual health, without putting their future child in danger and without socially and ethically harming their marriage’. ²⁵

Pachner's ideas were embraced by the regional Population Commission, which called for ‘limiting or generally preventing breeding by the biologically (physically as well as mentally) inferior elements’. Eugenics was invoked explicitly, as the commission expressed worries that ‘the principles of eugenics are not followed, to the great detriment of the population's biological worth as well as material damage to our national economy’. ²⁶ Medical certificates issued before marriage would help prevent the economic burden of care for the ill and disabled. Inspiration came also from plans for a similar law in Slovakia requiring a mandatory bill of health not older than 30 days, certifying that the candidates were free from a contagious venereal disease or tuberculosis in an infectious stage.

These efforts continued on the central level. The Central Commission for Population Issues, established in 1946, fully embraced Pachner's ideas in its ‘Population Policy Plan’. ²⁷ Among other pronatalist measures, the plan included compulsory medical examinations, and the Ministry of Health was supposed to draft a bill for this purpose. Organizations such as the Czech Eugenic Society and the Council of Women joined the discussion, supporting the idea of certificates. In 1946, few experts were against this measure. One was the venerologist and sexual education proponent Antonín Trýb, who had organized the World League for Sexual Reform conference in Brno in 1932. Trýb was co-opted to the Central Population Commission, yet refused to participate, writing, ‘I have expressed my opinion in the questionnaire of the Central Population Commission, so please relieve me of this assignment.’ ²⁸ While the questionnaire with Trýb's answers has not been preserved, we know that he was a fervent proponent of sexual education:

It is not, therefore, the task of sex education to be sexless, but to properly control and transform this powerful and valuable force into inclinations and deeds that are healthful and socially beneficial and beautiful.… It is not only a physiological or medical problem, nor only a psychological or philosophical or pedagogical concept. It requires a balanced knowledge of all this, not only by instruction but also by feeling, i.e., a great, in the best sense of the word, human experience. (Trýb and Lejhanec, 1949: 205)

As with the discussions held at the same time in Poland, Czechoslovak experts advising the ministry stressed the consensus around premarital medical examination among medical doctors; in reality, dissenting voices existed. ²⁹ Over time, experts indicated various problems hampering the introduction of premarital certificates. First, the problems were of a practical nature: doctors worried about the period of validity of medical certificates and issues of confidentiality. Second, some experts were concerned over limiting personal freedom, as others had been during the discussion held in 1919, when the Habsburg-era regulation was lifted. Compulsory medical screening before marriage could be regarded ‘as a new bothersome duty interfering with personal freedoms and civil liberties’. ³⁰

In the end, there was not enough conviction that restricting access to marriage was a proper way to fulfil eugenic ideas, and the commission decided to establish counselling centres without making their services mandatory for couples intending to marry, arguing that ‘people do not want to maliciously harm their spouse or endanger their future children. That happens only because of lack of advice and information.’ ³¹ In 1947, there was only one eugenics counselling centre affiliated with the outpatient clinic of Charles University in Prague, but others were planned for the regional cities of Hradec Králové, Plzeň, Brno, Olomouc, and Ostrava. ³² However, the eugenic discourse and concerns were rejected only after 1948, resulting from a broader ideological and political shift in population policies, an issue we discuss in the next section.

The idea to put premarital medical certificates into practice was intensively discussed in the early post-war years in all three national contexts. Various governmental bodies negotiated the introduction of premarital certificates. In Poland, there was a clash between the ministries of health and justice; in the SOZ, a conflict unfolded between central and local authorities; and in Czechoslovakia, the Population Commission took a leading role.

The personal continuity of experts and the state's concerns over securing a healthy population contributed to medical certificates being seriously considered. In Poland and the SOZ, the core of this preoccupation was the STI epidemic; Czechoslovak governmental bodies addressed population issues. In the first two cases, the discourse on premarital certificates also tackled hereditary diseases; in Czechoslovakia, the stress was on ‘positive’ eugenics, focused less on prevention than on encouraging reproduction. The German and Czechoslovak argumentation were similar in favouring the certificates due to the fear of economic burden to the state. If arguments against the measure were expressed in Poland, they were exclusively of a practical nature; in Czechoslovakia, some experts raised concern over personal freedoms; in Germany, the most pressing argument was the Nazi eugenic regulations that should have been rejected. This complex picture of argumentation in favour of and against premarital medical examination shows that this measure was discussed in similar ways in the three countries. Any expressions of racial eugenics were absent from the post-war discourse about premarital medical certificates. Despite similarities, the legal implementation took different forms. Poland introduced the certificates in 1945, but the measure was not put into practice, with a few local exceptions. In East Germany, Nazi laws were abolished, but the certificates partially persisted, decentralized at the local (federal state) level before the state intervened. In Czechoslovakia, the measures never materialized. These different paths led to the same final point: the rejection of the certificates in the late 1940s.

A farewell to medical certificates: The 1949/50 change

As communists consolidated power in each state, the influence of the proponents of eugenic measures dwindled. In Poland, the unification of the socialist and the communist parties in December 1948, regarded as the symbolic beginning of Stalinism, led to serious personnel changes at the highest levels of state administration, including the Ministry of Health. Historians have noted a general shift in the approach to genetics and the rise of Lysenkoism in 1949 (Dejong-Lambert, 2012; Gawin, 2018: 282–4, 286). Closer transnational ties with Czechoslovakia also played a role in making marital certificates disappear from Polish legislation. Czechoslovak experts promoting eugenic premarital certificates left the ministerial advisory bodies over the months following the communist takeover in February 1948. In May 1948, the Central Commission for Population Issues that had argued for premarital certificates was dismantled, and the last mention of ‘compulsory medical advice before marriage’ appeared in governmental plans in January 1949 (Lišková, 2018: 69–72). In the SOZ, similar to the development in Poland, the forced unification of the social democratic with the communist party into the Socialist Unity Party of Germany in 1946 was the beginning of an intensified introduction of Stalinist policies (Malycha, 2000; Pohlmann, 2017). During discussions in the SOZ central bodies about possible medical certification, their members always rejected its implementation due to its national socialist past; lastly, after the foundation of the German Democratic Republic (GDR) in 1949, the centralization process of the state structure also ‘corrected’ any deviation in this matter at the local level. As a result, medical certificates disappeared from state policies.

In Poland, the 1945 decree on marriage was abolished with the approval of the first family code in 1950, and – as archival material shows – under the influence of Czechoslovak experts. In 1949, a joint Polish-Czechoslovak commission worked together to elaborate a shared family code project to be implemented in both countries, a process discussed in detail by legal history scholar Piotr Fiedorczyk (Fiedorczyk, 2014: 191). The aim of the new legislation of family matters was to fully implement marital equality and abolish the category of illegitimate children. A discussion between Polish and Czechoslovak experts unfolded when the Polish side presented a draft of the code that included mental disease, mental underdevelopment, STIs, and tuberculosis as obstacles for marriage, while the Czechoslovak draft ‘did not include obstacles of eugenic nature’. ³³ The Polish side insisted it was important to keep the legislation that stemmed from ‘concern for healthy offspring’, pointing to the difficult situation in public health caused by the war and occupation. Czechoslovak experts considered a declaration of both betrothed parties that they were aware of each other's health conditions and the institution of partial incapacitation of the mentally ill as sufficient. Polish lawyer Jan Wasilkowski referred to ‘the shared opinion of all Polish medical faculties that every mental disease is hereditary, and all the offspring of such relationships will also suffer from mental illness. The state cannot sanction such marriages.’ ³⁴ Clearly, the spread of contagious diseases was not the only concern, and further discussion focused on mental illnesses. Upon the request of another Polish legal expert, Seweryn Szer, the commission agreed to call medical experts who would specify which mental illnesses were hereditary and whether there were illnesses that would endanger a marriage. The Polish delegation agreed to provisionally keep the Czechoslovak version, moving the STIs and tuberculosis from the code to transitional legislation. ³⁵

Polish psychiatrists who submitted their expert opinions supported the certificates. All of them asserted that there were various types of mental disorders and illnesses that could affect intellectual capacities in diverse ways. However, they admitted that there was insufficient knowledge on their hereditary nature. Psychiatrist Lucjan Korzeniowski pointed out that the ‘eugenic issue’ also included somatic diseases. ³⁶ Tadeusz Bilikiewicz, a leading Polish psychiatrist, suggested a more precise formulation in the laws to exclude diseases like neurosis that were not hereditary and to instead include alcoholism. ³⁷ Another doctor, Eugeniusz Brzeziecki, was in favour of marital certificates because mental illnesses could harm marital relationships, and not necessarily because of hereditary concerns. He warned that ‘mentally underdeveloped people’, ‘who as we know tend to be particularly fertile’, would procreate anyway. ³⁸ Only one expert, Władysław Chłopicki, advised caution in designing laws in order ‘not to turn to the severity that was characteristic of racist practices’, and suggested rejecting compulsory certificates in favour of premarital medical counselling that would engage psychiatrists, venerologists, and physiologists. ³⁹ Polish psychiatrists were aware of the Nazi eugenic legislation and their racial implications, which they wanted to avoid. Yet they were not rejecting eugenic concerns or (the bulk of) compulsory medical certificates on these grounds. Rather, they were sceptical about the hereditary nature of mental illnesses.

The Czechoslovak-Polish discussion shows that eugenic concerns were much more important for the Polish side. It was motivated by both the specific situation after the war, namely the epidemics of STIs and tuberculosis, and concerns over (hereditary) mental illnesses. Even in 1949, certificates were supported by lawyers, who were involved in drafting the 1945 decree, and medical professionals, who regarded them as a means to secure a healthy population. However, experts from the Polish Eugenic Society were no longer part of the discussion. Eventually, in the Polish family code issued in 1950, mental illness remained an obstacle to marriage, but the code did not mention any medical certificate, only a general statement for candidates for marriage that there were no obstacles in their case. Mental illness and ‘mental retardation’ were listed among the obstacles elsewhere in the family code. This framing, which erased medical certificates from Polish legislation, was in line with what Czechoslovak legal experts proposed but also reflected the concerns of Polish experts about the negative impact of mental illness and retardation on marriage and offspring.

After the state passed the new family code in 1950 and dissolved the Eugenic Society, discussions about premarital medical examinations diminished, although archival documents testify that experts in this field did not entirely abandon the idea. A ministerial plan for ‘mother and child care’ issued by the Ministry of Health for 1950–5 mentioned extensive premarital medical examinations, which, however, should become obligatory only after an awareness campaign, because otherwise ‘there will be many informal couples’. ⁴⁰ While a medical examination was to be recommended rather than imposed on the population, nobody seemed to question its usefulness. The Institute of Dermatology and Venerology in Warsaw planned research for establishing criteria for premarital check-ups, and, for example, in the case of syphilis to ‘serve as a theoretical background for a future law on compulsory premarital medical examination’. ⁴¹ Subsequently, experts still discussed medical certificates in/for the context of STIs and alcoholism (Fiedorczyk, 2014: 511).

As in Poland, the arguments of the proponents for controlling people who wanted to marry in the SOZ and early GDR were based on fears of spreading STIs. In Saxony in 1950, authorities enforced a procedure by which the registry office had to send an inquiry about the syphilis status of people applying for marriage to the health department and clinic. If one of the applicants had a case history, they were not allowed to marry until the other partner had been ordered to the health clinic. There, the ‘healthy partner’ would be informed about the syphilis infection of their betrothed and educated about the dangers of venereal diseases – no matter how long ago the syphilis infection occurred. For gonorrhoea, the regulations included only cases that were no older than one year. ⁴² This practice represented another forceful and intrusive measure. It confirms the thesis that, despite any centralization efforts in the SOZ and early GDR, local authorities enjoyed and defended their leeway. This situation was not least a product of Germany's history as a state consisting of many strong, and to a great degree independent, provincial governments. Facing this stubbornness and historical tradition was one reason East Germany dissolved its federal states in 1952 and created districts instead (‘Gesetz über die weitere Demokratisierung des Aufbaus’, 1952).

Before the dissolution of the federal states, there was a constant struggle between the federal and central state authorities, including in the case of preventing marriages, until 1952. For example, the Ministry of Health emphasized in a letter to the Ministry of Internal Affairs in December 1950 that ‘any means of coercion to prevent a marriage because of health ailments must be rejected by the Ministry of Health of East Germany’. ⁴³ The ministry and GDR state officials, in general, sought to limit the Weimar and Third Reich legacy of marriage restrictions and marriage counselling to the social hygienic and positive aspects of sexual health, family, and motherhood. In this context, they had to refrain from introducing marriage certificates, common in other countries like Sweden, and thus avoid associations with eugenic assessments (Weindling, 1997: 361–3). However, Saxony already had introduced a regulation in 1950 forcing future spouses to reveal their medical history. Subsequently, the state level intervened once again and Erwin Marcusson, a leading social hygienist and a high official at the Ministry of Health, ordered the repeal of this local regulation in May 1951. From this point onward, Saxon civil registrars were allowed to hand out only pamphlets that informed the people applying for marriage about the dangers of STIs and let them sign a confirmation that they received this document. ⁴⁴ This procedure seemed a more relaxed approach to STIs and marriages at the beginning of the 1950s. Indeed, the numbers of new infections were low in comparison to the post-war years. Nevertheless, the SMAD regulations to fight the spread of STIs remained valid until East Germany – after long internal discussions – passed its own law in 1961. In the light of this context, people with a presumed STI continued to face intrusive measures, such as raids of bars and clubs by health workers and the police, forced hospitalization, or sanctions if unable to name the source of their infection (Brüning, 2019; Wahl, 2019).

Nevertheless, the regulations of marriages remained a local matter until the mid 1950s. East German officials passed the first statewide ‘Regulation on Marriage and Marriage Dissolution’ only in 1955. Despite the proclamation of the Ministry of Health in 1951 that medical conditions were no reason to prevent marriages, this law included, besides incest and polygamy, the prohibition of people ‘who were [legally] incapacitated due to insanity, mental illness or alcoholism’ to marry (‘Verordnung zur Eheschließung und Eheauflösung’, 1955). As in Poland, alcohol addiction remained a recurring theme in preventing marriages and ‘damaged’ offspring. However, state officials decided that not every person with alcohol addiction or mental illness was ineligible to marry but only those who were legally incapacitated. When the East German family code was finally enacted in 1965, this section was revised to simply ‘incapacitation’ without any specific medical conditions (Familiengesetzbuch der Deutschen Demokratischen Republik, 1965). In the East German case, officials’ fears regarding STIs and alcohol addiction led to strict laws for people deemed ‘social outsiders’. However, the state never enforced the prevention of marriages with premarital medical certificates. Only locally, authorities temporarily implemented restrictions and ordered future spouses to reveal their ‘health status’. The shift in policies, as in Poland and Czechoslovakia, occurred after the state had consolidated and thus was able to impose its policies and correct local departures from the official course, which took place at the beginning of the 1950s.

After the communist takeover in Czechoslovakia in February 1948, the Central Commission for Population Issues was dissolved. A new commission was soon established, with new goals and discourses. While pronatalism did not fade away, the arguments for population growth changed. Pachner's plan was eventually abandoned, as the state's outlook shifted. ⁴⁵ The case for high birth rates shifted from a nationalist to a communist one, in which high numbers were seen as necessary for economic development and, during the first post-war decade, for the military capacity of the state.

Law 56 of 1948 on state support for newlyweds, adopted a month after the communist takeover, excluded ‘profligate persons, persons avoiding work, habitual drinkers, and persons suffering from a disease or defect threatening the health of the offspring’ from financial support for young married couples. A medical examination that would prove reproductive capacities was required to be able to apply for loans. ⁴⁶ Months after the communists took power, old ideas could be still detected in expert debates. In early 1949, ‘36 pro-population measures’ proposed to the government by the Ministry of Health very much resembled Pachner's plan, including a call to introduce compulsory medical advice before marriage and a call to open an institute for hereditability issues. ⁴⁷

While these documents still drew on pre-1948 solutions, new criticism of premarital medical screening arose. After the communists took over, medical doctors who had been opposed to the idea got a platform. The sexologist Josef Hynie wrote a letter to the (new) minister of health on 28 October 1948, suggesting that advisory centres for venerology, sexology, and eugenics might be part of local outpatient clinics. The gathered data could then be studied together with demographic topics at the Institute for Social Medicine (Ústav sociálního lékařství). ⁴⁸ The gynaecologist Antonín Černoch ‘opened his visit to the Ministry of Health by announcing … that his position on the matter of premarital counselling was negative.… Dr Černoch has gratefully accepted the announcement that he will be invited to participate in the renewal of this advisory body of the Ministry. He was also promised that he would be invited to the population group set up under the Office of the Government [předsednictvo vlády].’ ⁴⁹

The new law stipulated that ‘marriage cannot be contracted by a person who is mentally disordered or mentally deficient. Such a person may be allowed to marry only if his or her state of health is compatible with the nature and purpose of marriage’, adding, ‘There is no declaration of nullity of the marriage if the mental disorder has already passed.’ ⁵⁰ Together with the disappearance of premarital medical certificates, this phrasing suggests that a mental condition could have only a limited influence on entrance into marriage. The Family Law Act of 1949, based on a joint project of the Polish-Czechoslovak commission mentioned above, brought about a revolution in marriage and the status of women and children in the marital union by equalizing women and men in marriage and children irrespective of their (non-)marital birth. In the end, the Czechoslovak version of the law was very similar to the Polish one. Meanwhile, Law 56 failed, and the idea of compulsory premarital examination, whether because of contagious or sexually transmitted diseases, was no longer on the agenda.

In this section, we have shown how political changes affected the expert and policy discussions on premarital medical certificates. In the Czechoslovak case, the communist takeover led to the disappearance of marital certificates and the population expertise continued without the idea of certificates. In Poland, eugenic ideas (temporarily) disappeared with Stalinization and the monopolization of power by the communists. The idea of premarital medical examination was dropped under the influence of Czechoslovak experts, within the framework of joint discussion on the new, true socialist family code. In this sense, the consolidation of transnational relations within the socialist bloc contributed to the partial unification of marital legislation, including the issue of premarital certificates. The new East German authorities put more emphasis on rejecting the Nazi past and more pressure on local governments in order to eradicate eugenic measures, contributing to the gradual erasure of premarital medical examinations. In all three countries, the idea did not disappear overnight, but marital certificates were removed from the agenda legally and discursively by the early 1950s.

Poland: A long-lasting dream of medical certificates

As we have shown in the previous section, premarital medical certificates disappeared from the legislation in Czechoslovakia, East Germany, and Poland upon the monopolization of power by the communists. Post-Stalinist political liberalization and the pluralization of the public discourse, however, made it possible for eugenic arguments to re-emerge in Poland in 1959 and 1960 in the context of debates about family planning and the new family code, which was eventually passed in 1964.

With her article on a case of a family where two mentally ‘underdeveloped’ parents had numerous offspring, the journalist Mirosława Parzyńska initiated a discussion in the popular daily Life in Warsaw that later developed into an exchange between lawyers and medical doctors in the press and in the Codification Commission, which worked on a new family code (Parzyńska, 1959). Parzyńska raised her concerns about whether mentally ill parents could take care of their children properly, framing the discussion around ‘subnormal’ children and their (supposedly) growing numbers. Life in Warsaw became an official promoter of compulsory premarital medical examination and published expert opinions on it.

In those discussions, lawyers expressed scepticism to a greater extent than in the late 1940s. Zofia Stypułkowska, director of the Department of Minors in the Ministry of Justice, believed that making examinations obligatory might be counterproductive; nevertheless, she pointed to the need to ‘secure the well-being of future generations’. She reportedly said, ‘A network of eugenic and conscious motherhood counselling centres could do a great favour to the society’ (‘Czy obowiązek badań przedślubnych?’, 1960). Life in Warsaw organized an expert discussion involving two lawyers and two medical doctors. Seweryn Szer, a lawyer and one of the main architects of the 1945 marital decree, agreed than medical certificates would help in battling diseases, but expressed worries that people would turn to informal relationships. Parzyńska depicted these arguments as too moderate, calling the predominant opinions ‘eugenic tolerance’ (Parzyńska, 1960a). She believed that people's resistance to medical examination should be broken (as in the case of vaccination), because Poland was still backward in terms of health and mortality. She also argued that the ‘negative atmosphere around eugenics is gradually vanishing’ (Parzyńska, 1960b). Parzyńska brought the term eugenic back to the public discourse and called for discipline of the society.

Similar disciplining tones were expressed by medical doctors, whose voices were much more radical than those of the lawyers. Zofia Szymańska, a child psychiatrist and head of a child counselling centre (Martin, 2020), supported medical certificates, ‘because society is not yet on a desirable ethical level’. She suggested including alcoholism, which she saw as extremely destructive, and not only in a biological sense, as she also argued that alcoholic parents could not raise children properly. Leading gynaecologist and authority Jan Lesiński considered certificates as a means to propagate ‘sanitary education’ and ‘conscious motherhood’ (a phrase that refers to family planning; ‘Czy obowiązek badań przedślubnych?’, 1960). Another expert discussion took place in the Criminology and Forensic Section of the Polish Medical Society and focused on STIs (K. Gr., 1960a). Again, medical doctors supported certificates because of the cases of congenital syphilis in children, while lawyers debated that the measure would be ineffective, since ‘people have sex without marriage’.

In the 1960 debate, experts addressed the same diseases as in the late 1940s: STIs and mental diseases, mental underdevelopment, tuberculosis, and alcoholism, with a slightly more liberal approach to tuberculosis and STIs, due to progress in their treatment. Some experts active before 1950 continued to voice their support for the certificates in the post-Stalinist period. A well-known medical doctor and public health promotor, Marcin Kacprzak, editor-in-chief of the journal Public Health (Zdrowie Publiczne), gave lectures on the Eugenic Society's ‘premarital medical examination’ course in the 1940s. In 1957, he became the head of the Society of Conscious Motherhood, a family planning organization. Seweryn Szer continued to play the role of a legal expert. Journalist Mirosława Parzyńska addressed the issue of medical examination both in the late 1940s and early 1960s.

However, the early 1960s discussion contained new arguments to support medical certificates. The usual argumentation about the well-being of children was considerably expanded, as it embraced a concern about the fitness of parents to raise children properly. As Lesiński argued, ‘The disease of parents limits their ability to properly care and raise children’, which then ‘become a burden for the parents and society’ (Lesiński, 1962). The second context for premarital examination were broader ideas of marital happiness and family planning. Experts raised concerns about potential infertility that would possibly cause disappointment and endanger marital relationship (Beaupré, 1963; Lesiński, 1959). Premarital medical examinations would provide a chance not only, or not even primarily, to exclude some (reduced) number of candidates for marriage, but also to educate people about sexuality and family life. ‘Premarital counselling centres, run by medical doctors, sociologists, and social activists aim to facilitate a mutual understanding of duties of the spouses-to-be’, asserted Kacprzak (Kacprzak, 1962).

Compulsory medical certificates were also discussed in the context of legislation concerning alcoholism and STIs. The project of a new ‘anti-venereal’ law, discussed between 1959 and 1960, included a paragraph on compulsory medical examination that could be introduced by an ordinance, depending on the epidemic situation, but the Administrative Department of the Central Committee of the Polish United Workers Party, which critically analysed the proposed legislation, opposed it (K. Gr., 1960b). ⁵¹ The Codification Commission eventually rejected the idea of introducing certificates, arguing that ‘aside from the opinion of them, we are currently not able to properly organize such medical examinations’. ⁵² The final version of the 1964 family code included a prohibition to marry if a person was mentally ill or underdeveloped, similarly to the 1950 code. Premarital medical certificates were not introduced.

With premarital medical check-ups, we can make a similar argument as with the sterilization debate discussed by Kuźma-Markowska, in which some authors reshaped the eugenic line of thinking according to ‘socialist morality and humanitarianism’ (Kuźma-Markowska, 2011). While the eugenic movement was gone by the early 1950s, eugenic arguments came back 10 years later in the discourses of experts in family planning, within a broader framework of shaping a happy marital relationship.

Conclusions

Using the example of premarital certificates, we have shown the post-World War II persistence and communist rejection of eugenics in Czechoslovakia, East Germany, and Poland. In the wake of World War II, eugenic ideas and arguments were still prevalent among experts and policymakers as there was a broad continuity in the people in charge since the interwar period. Moreover, all three countries shared the overarching aim of a healthy population, which embraced pronatalist ambitions as well as the prevention of the spread of contagious diseases from which great numbers of citizens suffered. Premarital medical examinations and certificates were among the measures that had been widely considered to reach this goal since the late 19th century. However, the measure was not discussed in racial terms in these three countries during the post-war era: experts discussed medical certificates as a tool to prevent unhealthy people from reproducing, but without targeting specific ethnic groups. Experts explicitly rejected the racial components of eugenic ideas and policies, yet it did not stop them from supporting premarital medical examination as a tool to improve the public health of a population devasted by war.

What differed in the early post-war years was the degree of implementation: in Poland, certificates were legally introduced in 1945, but not put into practice; in the SOZ, the Nazi law was rejected but initially – and defiantly – restrictions to prevent marriages were introduced locally; and in Czechoslovakia, premarital medical certificates were repeatedly discussed on the ministerial level but never adopted. By tracing policymaking and exchanges between governmental bodies, we have shown the struggles to implement the certificates and the groups that supported the solution: in Czechoslovakia, it was the governmental Population Commission; in the SOZ, it was local authorities; and in Poland, it was the Ministry of Health.

The political turn of 1948–9, which covered the communist takeover in Czechoslovakia, the consolidation of power by Polish communists, and the foundation of East Germany, made the debate on premarital medical certificates and arguments that supported the measure disappear. The communist takeover and consolidation of power in all three national contexts had a clear impact on the eugenic debate. The return of the discussions about preventing marriages due to health concerns in Poland in 1959 shows that considerable political liberalization could make room for eugenic ideas to be expressed again in the public realm; even so, they never became law again. The story of premarital certificates in East-Central Europe thus attests to curious developments: a eugenic measure, broadly accepted in a democratic interwar period, survived World War II and was displaced only by consolidating Moscow-oriented communist regimes; this measure was again invoked in the post-Stalinist thaw, when doctrine and dogma could be challenged.

The comparative analysis we provide in this article contributes to the discussion on the transformation of post-war eugenics in East-Central Europe. Despite different historical trajectories concerning eugenics, Czechoslovakia, East Germany, and Poland experienced very similar shifts in the early post-war period: from a discussion on the implementation of premarital medical certificates as a eugenic measure to its rejection. The shift was possible, we argue, because of the political change. In East Germany and Czechoslovakia, the shift had a long-lasting impact, because premarital medical certificates were not discussed again.