Fascist Pigs: Technoscientific Organisms and the History of Fascism

The arrival of the Karakul flock from the Ukraine in Bohemia in the spring of 1944 is a prosaic reminder of the short life spans of such grandiose visions. When Himmler wrote to Körner about the Karakul flock, the Red Army had already expelled the Wehrmacht from much of the Ukraine, a key region for the establishment of the New Order. The archived records don’t tell us exactly where in the Ukraine the sheep came from, but it is reasonable to suppose they originated from the Karakul Experiment Station that had been established at Kriwoj Rog in 1941 by Rosenberg’s Ministry.[15] That city, located in southeastern Ukraine, was designated in the General Plan East as a ”base of colonization” for the Gotengau, which means it would be settled by SS “military-peasants,” the German frontier men.[16] As Himmler’s physician, Felix Kersten, recalled, the members of the SS dreamed of the grand estates in the east that had been promised to them as the first fruits of victory.[17] Himmler himself had introduced a compulsory savings system for the SS, noting that “an SS man, who in due course saves 2,000 to 3,000 Reich marks, has thereby laid the foundation for a settlement.”[18] And this was not an SS exclusive; many regular soldiers of the Wehrmacht also imagined themselves as landowners exploiting the labor of Slavic helots.[19] Karakul farms with more than 3,000 animals would require especially ambitious dreamers. These numbers actually contributed to the difficulties in transferring Himmler’s flock to the west, since, as Oswald Pohl—the responsible for the SS administration office—complained, there simply was no available land for the animals in the old Reich or in the Generalgouvernement (the German-occupied area of central Poland).[20]

^{Figure 6.2 Heinrich Himmler (wearing eyeglasses) at a 1941 exhibition dedicated to “Planning and Building in the East.”}

^{(Bundesarchiv, Bild 146–1974–079–57 / CC-BY-SA 3.0)}

The General Plan East also noted that “settlers have the obligation to be exemplary managers and pioneers in the agricultural, technical, and economic aspects of farming.”[21] Settlers were to make intensive use of tractors, chemical fertilizers, and new seeds and animals bred for increased productivity. The Karakul Experiment Station at Kriwoj Rog was thus part of a technoscientific infrastructure built to produce the proper environment for the flourishing of settlers’ communities in the frontier—in this case, supplying “armed peasants” with valuable rams and ewes and offering expertise on “scientific animal husbandry,” as suggested in the General Plan East.[22] It was an outpost of Empire preparing the place to receive pioneers after the first clearing of the terrain.

As much as Hitler mused about the transformation of the Russian steppe into “one of the loveliest gardens in the world” tended by Aryan settlers, this was not to be a creation ex nihilo.[23] We know that both the colonial governor (the infamous Gauleiter Erich Koch) and Himmler were violently opposed to any form of indirect rule and curtailed any talk of participation in the New Order by local Ukrainian elites, who were quickly dismissed as Negervolk (“niggers”).[24] But even the most radical Nazis succumbed to the limits of Imperial power.[25] It was not only that Germans had kept the soviet kolkhozes (collective farms) in order to guarantee the agriculture output of the region.[26] As Susanne Heim has made clear, much of the German agricultural scientific and technical infrastructure in the east was based on taking over Soviet agriculture research institutes.[27] Considering the highly developed exploration of Karakul sheep by Soviet animal breeders, it seems reasonable to suppose that the Germans’ Kriwoj Rog Experiment Station in southeast Ukraine was also based on preexistent Soviet research efforts.[28] That hypothesis is supported by the fact that when the Karakul flock was moved west to protect it from the Soviet advance in the Ukraine, 26 Russian technicians and veterinarians were brought with it even though some Nazi officials were reluctant to allow Slavs to enter the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia.[29]

Karakul as Model Organism and Industrialized Organism: Curl Formation and Fur Markets