Fascist Pigs: Technoscientific Organisms and the History of Fascism

Karakul sheep are highly valued animals, originating from Bukhara in Uzbekistan, whose pelts are used to produce the famous Persian fur coats also known as Astrakhan. The growing interest in these sheep since the second half of the nineteenth century is part of the wider story of the replacement of vanishing wild animals with domesticated ones to supply urban consumers with fur goods.[6] In Germany, Leipzig had been an important center of the production of fur goods since the Middle Ages, importing raw skins from Russia and exporting pelts to the main European cities. Karakul pelts from central Asia first appeared in the Leipzig market in 1850.[7] The resistance of Karakul to drought (attributable to their fat tails) and their high value in the international fur market allegedly enabled the settlement of brave pioneer communities in frontier settings, making the Karakul a perfect companion species for fascist imperial expansion.[8]

In the difficult military context of the spring of 1944, Himmler’s detailed inquiry about Karakul may seem intriguing. Such attention indicates not only the high value of luxurious Persian fur coats in Nazi Germany but also Himmler’s high expectations regarding the role of Karakul in the German colonial rule in eastern Europe.[9] Sheep raising had been identified as part of the economic activities sustaining the settlers of the General Plan East, the Nazi blueprint for the future of eastern Europe drafted by the geographers, demographers, rural sociologists, and landscape architects of Himmler’s Commissariat for the Reinforcement of Germandom (Reichskommissariat für die Festigung deutschen Volkstums—RKFdV).[10] The plan, built on the killing, expulsion, and enslavement of tens of millions of Jews and Slavs to make space for brave settlers of German descent, was to make the region into a planner’s Eden, with towns, villages, forests, and industrial areas carefully distributed in the landscape and connected by a network of railway lines and Autobahnen.[11] In the version presented at the end of 1942 to Himmler by Konrad Meyer, chief of the planning office of the RKFdV, the complete Germanization of the areas annexed from the Soviet Union was to be accomplished within 30 years by the settlement of 10 million Germans from the Reich, more than a million from “Germanic” countries, and 200,000 more from overseas. To accomplish such grandiose plan, 45 million people were to be removed from their homes in central and eastern Europe, 31 million of them to be deported further east or murdered, and 14 million of them to remain in the area as forced workers.

^{Figure 6.1 An astrakhan coat made from the fur of Karakul sheep.}

^{(Gustav Frölich and Hans Hornitschek, Das Karakulschaf und seine Zucht, F. C. Mayer, 1942, p. 207)}

In July of 1942, when Hitler approved the plans for the settlement of the east, Himmler confessed it was “the happiest day of his life” and boasted about the “greatest piece of colonization that the world will ever have seen,” making the case for looking at the German invasion of the Soviet Union as the last great land grab in the long and bloody history of European colonialism.[12] In the outskirts of the empire, in its most remote eastern regions, the new villages were to be inhabited by Aryan armed peasants forming a defensive wall repelling the barbaric Asian hordes. The “Go East” push was to be driven by the establishment of colonial outposts trusted with the double task of “defending the ultimate ownership of the land conquered by the sword” and increasing “German blood” to guarantee demographic expansion. In September of 1942, from his secret field headquarters in Zhytomyr, Ukraine, Himmler declared: “[T]his Germanic East extending as far as the Urals must be cultivated like a hothouse of Germanic blood…. The next generations of Germans and history will not remember how it was done, but rather the goal.”[13] If, as in Frederick Jackson Turner’s thesis, the experience of the western frontier was the basis of American democracy, for Nazi ideologues the settlement of the eastern frontier was to become the source of German cultural rejuvenation and the materialization of Germany’s manifest destiny.[14]