Fascist Pigs: Technoscientific Organisms and the History of Fascism

Looking at coffee, rubber, and cotton is a way of gaining historical hindsight into how fascists organized their colonial territories, even when projects were abruptly ended by the military defeat of fascist powers. It was the breeding work on coffee at Malcó experiment fields, on kok-sagyz at Auschwitz, and on cotton at CICA laboratories in Lourenço Marques (today Maputo) that made plausible the vision of imperial territories supplying the autarkic economies of fascist regimes. The technoscientific organisms coming out of the breeders’ plots were the ones materializing on the ground the grand rhetoric of Lebensraum, Grande Italia, and “Portugal is not a small country.” Their scandal is to suggest that a future European New Order under the Nazis, or Mussolini’s Italian Oriental Africa, wouldn’t have been a historical oddity. Auschwitz was not just a death factory; it was also a laboratory producing colonial life. Breeders’ artifacts integrated fascist nations in the larger dark colonial history of grabbing land for the production of cash crops grown by natives through violent forced-labor regimes. The new organisms enlarged the organic nation through Empire.

6 Sheep: Fascist Settlers and the Colonization of Africa and Europe

Karakul and the Nazi Eastern Empire

In May of 1944, Heinrich Himmler, Reichsführer of the SS, wrote to SS Brigadenführer Helmut Körner, who as Landesbauernführer was responsible for agriculture in the Nazi regime’s civil administration in the Ukraine, concerning the fate of a flock of Karakul sheep that had recently arrived at the SS-Truppenübungsplatz (military training area) at Böhmen.[1] The flock had reached the vast Waffen-SS military training area in the territory of the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia after the rapid German retreat on the Eastern Front. Himmler, acknowledging his “great interest” in the raising of Karakul sheep, and invoking the status of the SS as fiduciary of the flock, made clear his intentions of acquiring at least one third of the animals. The presence of the sheep in contested territory demanded careful negotiations among the SS, the Wehrmacht, the Ministry of Food and Agriculture, and the Ministry for the Occupied Eastern Territories. In the end, Himmler was able to transfer all the sheep to SS custody and to have them moved to an SS farm in newly occupied Hungary.[2] The point here is not to delve into the well-known tensions between Himmler’s SS and Alfred Rosenberg’s Reichsministerium für die besetzten Ostgebiete (Ministry for the Occupied Eastern Territories). Instead of getting lost in the Nazi bureaucratic maze, let us follow the sheep and see what they may reveal about Germany’s eastward expansion and about the fascist imperial ventures of Italy and Portugal.[3]

More than just building a comparative argument, I intend to offer a trans-imperial narrative woven via the travels of the Karakul, discussing the significance of the frontier experience for fascism. As we saw, the three fascist regimes inherited different things from their predecessors. Portugal already possessed an empire. Germany launched a violent campaign to build a new one after the lost of its African territories. Italy had both an “old colony” in Libya and new colony in recently conquered Ethiopia. But such formal differences tend to blur when looked at closely. Only after the pacification campaign in Cyrenaica in 1930–1933, which was no less brutal than the 1935–36 Abyssinian campaign, did Libya support the dreams of Italian settlers populating what was then known as the fourth shore (Quarta Sponda) of Grande Italia. In other words, a major portion of the Libyan territory should be perceived as a new colony. Also, Portugal’s possessions in Africa looked impressive when viewed on a map, but the European presence there was squalid.[4] Salazar’s regime would make big efforts to “nationalize the empire” through increased presence of white settlers and the tightening of economic ties between the colonies and the metropole.[5] Indeed, from their very early stages on, each of the three regimes had invested in making its empire a guarantor of national independence, aiming to form a self-sufficient bloc and to cut ties with an international system dominated by England, the United States, and France. The empire would also constitute the solution to the “population surpluses” of the three countries that fed the previous flux of emigration to the Americas. The example of the Karakul sheep will enable us to see how such expansion projects were to be materialized in the territories of the empire—how communities of settlers were to sustain themselves in new frontier regions and to contribute to the imperial economies of the fascist regimes.