Fascist Pigs: Technoscientific Organisms and the History of Fascism

But if Köhler’s work was aimed at changing the RNS recommendations for prevention of virus diseases,[115] his intensive use of test plants was too slow and costly to be used effectively on a large scale by commercial breeders and seed multipliers.[116] In 1936, the BRA’s director, while pleading for more funds for his institution from Minister of Food and Agriculture Richard W. Darré, acknowledged that it had not yet been possible to produce a quick standard procedure for RNS officials to evaluate commercial potato breeders and certify businesses that their seeds were free of virus infection.[117] In that same year, the Nazis’ Four-Year Plan was launched, putting more pressure on potato production to get Germany ready for waging war in four years. It was for that reason that Carl Stapp, also at the BRA, began to explore faster serological methods. Centrifuged sap from the tuber to be tested was dropped on thin wafers impregnated with virus antiserum produced by immunized rabbits. After 20 minutes of incubation it was possible to examine the probe under a microscope and determine the presence or absence of viruses. In 1943 Stapp claimed to have tested several thousand seeds from different commercial breeding houses and suggested the extended use of centrifuges, incubators, and microscopes to deploy the BRA method to the German fields. After a few weeks of training, every technician would allegedly be qualified to perform the serological procedure, which according to Stapp was to play a crucial role in guaranteeing Germany’s food security. We don’t have data about the spread of the method in the war years, but Stapp himself cited its use by breeding farms in the Lüneburger Heide (Lüneburg Heath).[118]

Experimental Systems and the Expansion of the Nazi Regime

It is important to retain from this story that each new experimental system developed by the BRA at its sprawling Dahlem facilities not only sustained a growing community of scientists tinkering with potato varieties, pathogens, and testing procedures; it also enhanced the presence of Darré’s Reichsnährstand in the German countryside. It was no small thing that BRA scientists offered the RNS a quick method for detecting viruses’ presence in a field. The capacity of the RNS to intervene in German agriculture grew with each new experimental system developed by the BRA. Research on wart allowed for cleansing the chaotic potato seed market, establishing a biological basis to differentiate between varieties; the Colorado Beetle mobilized Germans by the hundreds of thousands, children and women included, to defend the national soil from foreign intruders; viruses extended the RNS’s control over commercial breeders fields. In all these cases the experimental work had to do mainly with developing quick methods of inoculating a large number of potato specimens and identifying resistant varieties.

What might have been perceived as an innocent scientific activity similar to what phytopathologists were doing in other parts of the world was actually an important part of the expansion of the Nazi regime through the action of the RNS. To tinker with combinations of potatoes, pathogens, and inoculation tests, to tinker with experimental systems, led to new epistemic things such as Muller’s phytoalexin. But it also led to inclusion in the Reichssortenlist of varieties resistant to late blight, promising to overcome the food-shortage traumas of World War I and to make Germany ready for another war as was demanded by the Four-Year Plan. The RNS based its control of the seed circuit on the tests developed at the BRA. In the opposite direction, the BRA used the RNS’s regional structure to guarantee that its standards would reach the entire country.

There is more to this relationship than simply that the regime drew resources from science and vice versa.[119] It probably is better to speak of co-production of science and the state than to speak of resources as if science and politics were two different spheres.[120] The intimate relationship between the RNS and the BRA, with departments of the first present in the facilities of the second, points at tighter entanglements. As has been demonstrated, experimental systems at the BRA measured their success both by their capacity to generate new scientific things and by their contributions to the expansion of the Nazi regime.