Fascist Pigs: Technoscientific Organisms and the History of Fascism

The contrasts are indeed illuminating. In both countries commercial breeders were the first obvious beneficiaries of the plant patents and seed decrees. But in Nazi Germany the BRA, through its standards, ensured that their commercial releases were aligned with the regime’s food policies as expressed in the Battle of Production. In addition, potatoes were at the core of the German system, something that made sense only because a centralized state infrastructure such as the RNS controlled the entire seed market.

The Colorado Potato Beetle

Relations between plant pathology and the Nazi reorganization of peasant life as materialized through the RNS were not limited to seed standardization. With the Decree on Plant Protection (Reichspflanzenschutzgesetz) issued in March of 1937, the RNS took over the regional structure of the Plant Protection Offices, previously in the hands of the BRA, and integrated it into Department II of its Organizational Chart—the Farm.[68] The Landesbauernschäfte of the RNS were now the ones that organized and funded each of the 26 Plant Protection Offices and their 350 trained scientists, responsible for the observation, registration, and fighting of plant pests in the fields.[69] The offices were also the regional centers from which leaflets and warnings on menacing pests were spread. Nonetheless, all the collected local observations, bugs included, were to be sent to the BRA in Berlin-Dahlem, which retained its department of plant protection as the center of the entire structure reinforcing the overlapping of the latter with the structure of the RNS. All these materials were the basis for producing the monthly report issued by the BRA with the spatial distribution in the country of the different plant pathologies. The progress of the Colorado potato beetle—one of the most feared pests of the potato crop—from the French territory into Germany was followed carefully in the 1930s.[70] In addition to publishing maps showing the front line of the beetle attack in various periodicals, the BRA had its officers pinpointing on large wall maps the locations where the beetle had been detected.

During the invasion of Colorado potato beetle in 1914, the Kaiserliche Biologische Anstalt für Land- und Forstwirtschaft, forerunner of the BRA, had already formed a commission, headed by the entomologist Martin Schwartz, that attempted radical eradication of the beetle in the Stade area of Lower Saxony. The use of chemical pesticides such as crude benzene was, not surprisingly, depicted by the press as a military action by Reich soldiers against a foreign army of beetles.[71] In 1934 the enemy was spotted once more in Stade, just 2 kilometers away from the previous site.[72] This time the BRA mobilized 140 people, including students and members of the Reichsarbeitsdienst (Reich Labor Service—the Nazi equivalent of depression era relief programs), to undertake successive steps of the campaign: searching, sieving, clearing, and spraying. For each action, divisions (Abteilung) were created, which subsequently were subdivided into columns, each led by one Führer. For a planned search of a potato field, for example, 75 men formed five search columns (Suchtkolonnen), each with fourteen members and one column Führer, or, alternatively, four search columns and three sieving columns. Each column was to advance in an orderly manner, covering the entire field with members separated from one another by a distance of two potato lines. Whenever a beetle was spotted, the attacked plant was marked, the event was registered, and, if possible, the bug was captured and put into a bottle (carried by the column’s Führer) to be sent to Berlin. Clearing and spraying also were done in military style.

^{Figure 3.7 A Reichsnährstand beetle wagon in the Saarland, July 1936.}

^{(Nachricthenblatt für den Deutschen Pflanzenschutzdienst 16, no. 7, 1936: 53)}