Fascist Pigs: Technoscientific Organisms and the History of Fascism

In particular, it is hard to overlook the fact that Darré worked as a “voluntary assistant” under Frölich from February to June 1925, dealing with the problem of the different patterns governing color inheritance of Cornwall and Berkshire hogs. Darré explored the possibility that the explanation for such differences was to be found in the diverse histories of domestication of the different breeds, which constituted the basis of his essay “Die Domestikation der Hausschweine,” graded “good” by Frölich. This concern for the intertwined natural histories of humans and domesticated animals was also Darré’s main argument in his essay “The pig as a distinguishing feature for northern peoples and Semites.” And, as Gesine Gerhard has already noted, Darré apparently had no difficulty transferring the methods of animal breeding he had learned with Frölich to the breeding of humans, as may be concluded from his insistence on breeding a “new aristocracy from Blood and Soil” (the title of his most celebrated essay).[7] The animal breeder needed to establish the bloodlines of the different breeds that constituted the basic units of his work; the human breeder, Darré suggested, needed to produce in Germany a pure Nordic race in order to restore a true national community free from dangerous exotic elements.[8]

Darré’s first work after leaving Halle consisted in tracing the bloodlines of Hannoverian Horses, which he explicitly compared to the task of re-creating the ideal Nordic man. Historians thus are certainly not pushing analogies too far in suggesting that Darré’s blood-and-soil utopia and his program for breeding a new “rural aristocracy” out of the German peasantry owed much to his acquaintance with animal breeding. Darré’s proposal that breeding wardens (Zuchtwarte) screen the men and women who would live on the new hereditary landholdings (Hegehöfe) that would guarantee the re-creation of the Nordic race was not much different from the institutional arrangements that were imposing new standards on animal breeding in Germany. Reichsführer of the Schutzstaffel (SS) Heinrich Himmler, who had studied agriculture in the Technical University in Munich and who before Darré joined the party was the man responsible for Nazi agrarian ideology, recognized in Darré an indisputable authority in matters of heredity and made him chief of the Race and Settlement Office (Rasse- und Siedlungshauptamt, abbreviated RuSHA) in 1932.[9] Not only was Darré trusted with the task of selecting the families of brave Germans to settle in eastern European; he was also responsible for the selection of applicants to the SS and for permissions for SS members to marry. Who would have been more appropriate for the job of selecting the humans forming the SS clan than an expert in pig breeding?

As suggestive as these analogies between humans and pigs may be, we now know how little practical effect they had in cultivating an SS aristocracy. The approximately 20,000 marriage applications by SS members awaiting processing by May of 1937 justified Himmler’s decision to relax the time-consuming requirements of the procedure. In the previous year, Himmler had already suspended the demand that an SS applicant produce a family tree stretching back to 1800.[10] Compiling an SS clan book comparable to the animal studbooks and registers was never easy, even in such a controlled environment. Extending it to the whole German peasantry, as Darré dreamed of doing, proved even more difficult.[11] And later, when the RuSHA officials faced the challenge of screening millions of people in the occupied eastern Europe territories for German blood in order to build a Ethnic German List from which to settle the region, the arbitrariness of racial examination was obvious, the decisive element being the “immediate impression gained by the assessor at the examination.”[12] The Nazis’ murderous racial policies had a reach unknown to any other political regime, but their implementation was always messier than Nazis were ready to admit.[13]