Fascist Pigs: Technoscientific Organisms and the History of Fascism

The Seed Decree issued by Darré’s Ministry in March 1934, only one year into Nazi rule, established a compulsory registering system in which only the best varieties of each crop were allowed into the list, these being the only ones that could be sold in the market. The change brought by the decree was an important one, and in 1937 there were no more than 74 potato varieties in the list.[40] As has already been noted, lists of approved varieties were being elaborated by the BRA and publicized by the DLG as guidance for farmers and peasants, but only after the seed decree of 1934 was it forbidden by law to commercialize varieties excluded from the list.[41] With the Nazis’ Battle of Production, not only were there far fewer approved varieties; those varieties were the only ones legally commercialized. In subsequent years, the exclusion of some varieties would extend to cultivation itself.

^{Figure 3.5 Performing the sprout test at the Biologische Reichsanstalt für Land- und Forstwirtschaft, 1936.}

^{(Die Biologische Reichsanstalt für Land und Forstwirtschaft in Berlin-Dahlem, Paul Parey, 1936)}

According to BRA data, in 1935 around 75 percent of the German fields were already being cultivated with approved potato varieties resistant to wart disease.[42] That is an impressive number indeed if we recall that by 1925 only 24 varieties had been identified as holding resistance to wart. In 1937 a new decree was issued strictly banning the commercialization of seeds from susceptible varieties from June 1940 on, and severely forbidding the cultivation of such varieties after March 1941—a ban that would endure in the subsequent decades in both West and East Germany.[43] To ensure enforcement of the law, Plant Defense Offices and local police were supposed to exert control over both farmers’ fields and the seed trade.[44] Neither in Italy or Portugal had seeds ever been banished from the commercial circuit, much less prevented from being cultivated. Also, the well-developed commercial seed market in Germany made commercial breeders much more important actors in the cleansing of the seed market than they were in Italy or Portugal. But it is more interesting that the release of new breeds was conditioned to the standards established by the Battle of Production. Potatoes that after having been tested at the BRA were considered as not contributing to the nutritional independence of the Volk didn’t have a place in Nazi Germany.

^{Figure 3.6 Sprouts from various potato varieties, 1931.}

^{(K. Snell, “Sorteneigenschaft und Sortenmerkmal,” Der Züchter 3, no. 4, 1931: 125–127)}

The short description given above already suggests the close proximity of BRA activities to the bureaucratic structure of the Reich in the Nazi years. If before 1933 the testing work put the BRA in direct relation with commercial breeders and the DLG, with the reorganization of agriculture by the Nazis that relationship was to be intermediated by the Reichsnährstand (RNS—Reich Food Estate), the mammoth Nazi institutional arrangement responsible for managing agriculture and food production. An account of the restructuring of the agriculture sector through the RNS is needed to better understand how laboratory work at the BRA related to the Nazi bureaucracy.[45]

Ritual celebrations of the harvest day, with peasants dressed in allegedly traditional costumes happily dancing old Germanic dances and celebrating the annual pig slaughter on their hereditary farms, have led many scholars to quickly dismiss Blut und Boden as the folkloric side of Nazi ideology, or as the pastoral component of Nazism. And even among historians who have explored the role of agriculture in Nazi Germany in more depth there is a clear tendency to consider its main ideologue, Richard Walther Darré, as an outdated character willing to build an impossible rural arcadia in modern times, soon to be replaced by more technocratic and pragmatic Nazi officers such as Herbert Backe.[46] An uncomfortable contradiction arises from scholarship simultaneously dealing with Darré as the embodiment of Nazi antimodernist reaction and with his role as Reichsbauernführer, the top of the pyramid of the all-embracing RNS bureaucratic structure.