Fascist Pigs: Technoscientific Organisms and the History of Fascism

In 1911 Broili had obtained from the US Department of Agriculture a number of wild South American Solanum plants which he could not identify precisely and which were subsequently subjected to intense inbreeding. This work established the hybrid character of one of the species and led Broili to label its progeny as F-varieties (the F standing for ‘fraglich’, which means “doubtful”).[82] From the beginning he was interested in exploring the potential of such material to introduce resistance to late blight into commercial varieties.[83] Nevertheless, according to Müller’s own account, World War I and the ensuing difficulties in getting technical assistance hindered Broili’s breeding plans. It was only after Müller’s arrival in 1922 at the BRA that a systematic comparison was made between the F-varieties and commercial ones. That comparison would establish the immunity of the F-varieties to late blight attacks.

The most distinguishing feature of the breeding work at the BRA was the importance given to the procedure for exposing plants and tubers to a pathological agent. To develop standardized laboratory methods of infection was a mandatory first step toward the breeding of resistant strains.[84] These methods sought to guarantee not only that selections would be made properly and that plants would be exposed to pathogens, but also that the entire procedure would be streamlined in order to screen a large number of specimens.

The first step undertaken by Müller to explore the resistance of the F-varieties was to infect young shoots of potatoes with fresh-hatched zoospores of the fungus responsible for late blight (Phytophthora infestans) under optimal conditions for the development of the latter. Next he increased efficiency by using seedlings instead of shoots, placing them in pad-stitched boxes. After the seedlings developed their first three or four leaves, he applied a few droplets of a solution containing the Phytophthora zoospores. Susceptible seedlings would die, while immune ones would survive. In a small laboratory with modest resources, Müller was thus able to screen thousands of seedlings in a relatively short period of time.[85]

From 1925 on, the method was intensively used by Müller in his crossings of F-varieties with commercial cultivars. It enabled him to prove that resistance to late blight was inherited independently of crucial economic properties such as yielding and time to maturity.[86] He named the hybrids thus obtained the W-varieties, which he soon was publicizing among German commercial breeders and among fellow public breeders abroad.[87] The W-varieties promised to end one of the chief afflictions of European farmers, responsible not only for the mid-nineteenth-century Irish famine but also in large part for the disastrous food shortages in Germany during World War I.

The memory of the “turnip winter” of 1917 was repeatedly invoked to assert the relevance of the BRA phytopathology work to the Nazi Battle of Production.[88] By the 1930s the losses due to late blight were estimated at a third to a half of the total potato crop.[89] The combination by Müller of standardized inoculation methods with the employment of wild varieties from South America holding the desired resistance genes confirmed the capacity of modern plant breeding to overcome the major challenges faced by European agriculture. Allegedly, it was just a question of time for commercial breeders to start releasing resistant varieties by crossing Müller’s W-varieties with high-yielding European cultivars. In 1934 the Sandnudel made its appearance in the RNS Reichssortenlist as the first commercial variety resistant to Phytophthora infestans, the first enemy of the potato plant.[90] Thanks to the technoscientific organisms coming out of the BRA, Darré’s promises that the national soil would feed the national community didn’t seem crazy reveries. Germans could remain “children of the potato.”