Fascist Pigs: Technoscientific Organisms and the History of Fascism

The next year, 1935, the presence of the enemy was detected 20 kilometers from the German border in France. That led to the quick creation by the BRA of the Kartoffelkäfer-Abwehrdienst (Office of Defense from the Colorado Potato Beetle)—in the framework, of course, of the RNS structure. A connection between this new office and the local populations was established by a local representative (Vertrauensmann), who had a Colorado Beetle demonstration kit with the bugs in different development stages to instruct the rest of the population.[73] Children were actively involved in the defense strategy, with the BRA designing and distributing school calendars depicting colored images of the insect in its various forms.[74] The first child to detect a beetle in a field was awarded the Kartoffelkäfer-Ehrennadel (Colorado Beetle Honor Medal), and those who spotted the insect again in the same area were offered a Colorado Beetle pin.[75] Women were also mobilized to the effort, which was officially part of the Battle of Production, and were offered short training courses on how to identify the main enemies of the German potato crop.[76] The beetle thus became one of the best-known insects among the whole German population, and the effort to eradicate it became an effective way of getting rural people, children and women included, to participate in the defense of the fatherland. After the issuing of the Plant Protection decree of 1937, participation in search days (Such­tagen), in tight columns as described above, would become mandatory.[77]

^{Figure 3.8 A 1937 elementary school chart with illustrations showing the differences between the harmful (schädlich) Colorado potato beetle from the useful (nützlich) ladybug.}

^{(Nachricthenblatt für den Deutschen Pflanzenschutzdienst 17, no. 7, 1937: 53)}

By 1941, the BRA claimed to have its campaign against the Colorado Beetle underway in 82 villages and cities in western Germany, the areas more afflicted by the beetle. At least 204,000 hectares had been cleared by the brigades of the Defense Office, which included 88 advisors, 91 office workers, 279 technicians, 97 truck-drivers, 43 co-drivers, 24 mechanics and foremen, and 20 auxiliary men. In the same year, 4,536 training courses were reportedly attended by about 700,000 Germans, 600,000 Alsatians, and 350,000 people from Lorraine.[78] Even if we discount the exaggerated numbers, there is little doubt about the capacity of the Nazis’ plant-protection campaigns to reach large shares of the population.[79] The training courses, the images on children’s calendars, and the demonstration kits all contributed to making the Colorado Beetle into an enemy menacing the survival of the national community. Every finding and subsequent elimination of a beetle was transformed into a significant contribution to the food battle keeping the German race alive. Through such operations everyone was able to feel that he or she was contributing to a major transcendent cause even when performing the apparently humble task of searching a field for bugs. To be sure, many other pest-control campaigns in Germany had invoked the presence of the enemy in national soil and the need to exterminate it by means of chemical warfare. But the high rhetoric of earlier campaigns did not match the mobilization of local populations at such a grand scale as during the Nazi years, involving hundreds of thousands of villagers, women and children included, in a kind of participatory science for the defense of the Fatherland.

Late Blight

Neither wart nor the Colorado Beetle could compete with the significance of late blight, the pest that allegedly had caused Germany’s defeat in World War I. It is thus not surprising that Karl Otto Müller, the scientist responsible for releasing the first breeds of potatoes resistant to late blight, became the most celebrated figure of the Biologische Reichsanstalt für Land- und Forstwirtschaft. Müller was the head of the Genetics and Breeding Section of the Botany Department of the BRA from 1927 to 1945.[80] After his studies at the University of Berlin with such luminaries of genetics as Carl Correns and Eugen Fischer, he went to work for the BRA in 1922 as a research assistant to Josef Broili, who was then in charge of the BRA’s plant-breeding efforts.[81]