Fascist Pigs: Technoscientific Organisms and the History of Fascism

Darré argued in “Das Schwein als Kriterium für nordische Völker und Semitten” that with no pigs there were no true Germans. The domestication of pigs, he suggested, was a crucial component of the process of forming a Northern race distinct from the Semitic ones. Raising pigs was taken as a constitutive element of being German. Racial distinctions were not only a matter of different biological origins but also a matter of different relations to the soil, such as those that pigs made possible. In Martin Heid­egger’s conception of race, Germans, being “rooted in the soil,” were “able to create for themselves a native land, even in the wilderness,” whereas “the nomads… left numerous wastelands behind them that had been fertile and cultivated land when they arrived.”[14] As is suggested throughout this book, the biological organic nation was defined as much through food as through race. According to Darré, race was defined through practices of food production: Germans were separated from Jews by pigs.

The new nobility (Adel) promoted by Darré relied not only on identifying human blood lineages but also on the production of pigs and potatoes, attaching Germans to the soil. If, as the SS story reveals, there is good reason to doubt the effectiveness of the Nazi state in applying genetics to form a new racial national community, this book suggests that we should nevertheless pay close attention to the historical role of breeding plants and animals in the making of Nazi Germany.

Darré’s pig talk was not only about a mystical distant past of forests, acorns, and ancient Aryans. He was trying to address the very concrete experience of hunger familiar to the German population during World War I. In Der Schweinemord (1937), Darré offered a reinterpretation of the policies of drastically reducing the size of the German pig herd in the war years as a plot by Jewish academics to eliminate the German race.[15] The effort by the Ministry of Interior during the conflict to guarantee that the 25 million hogs held by German peasants would not compete with humans for potatoes and grain in a context of food rationing was described as a Jewish plot that contributed directly to the death by starvation of three quarters of a million Germans. According to Darré, Jewish experts in academic institutions and in government offices, who had poor statistics and poor knowledge of the actual conditions of husbandry, declared a “war on pigs” that reduced the size of the German herd by about 15 million. The surplus of potatoes not consumed by pigs in 1915 failed to reach the population as a result of a lack of central control over distribution, and many tons of potatoes rotted in poor storage conditions. With the above-mentioned late blight epidemics of the potato crop of 1917 and the increasing demand for potatoes to compensate for the lack of pork and lard, the situation turned disastrous.[16] Darré singled out Walther Rathenau, an industrialist who headed Germany’s department of economic management in 1914 and 1915, as the head of the plot. Darré accused Rathenau of being one of the Elders of Zion, and of intentionally depleting the food supplies of the Reich.[17]

Der Schweinemord held some lessons for the future. First, at the outset of World War I Germany clearly had not prepared to sustain an international blockade. The experts who controlled German agriculture were accused of being unable to think in true nationalist terms, with much of the country’s husbandry dependent on imports of feed from the Americas. The experts’ insistence on relying on international markets to feed German animals had allegedly put the country in a precarious position. According to Darré, the war had demonstrated that the existence of the Volk depended as much on arms as on nutrition.[18] In order to guarantee Germany’s independence, food production in peacetime should be organized in the same way as a mobilization for war.

This line of thought led to the important second lesson on the significance of centralizing control of agriculture production in a big state structure such as the Reichsnährstand (RNS). Nutritional independence and centralization were to guide the actions of the RNS. Contrary to common interpretations positioning Darré among the Nazi ruling elite as someone resisting the pressures for increased production by more aggressively militaristic figures such as Hermann Göring and emphasizing his excessive concerns with sustaining German peasant traditions, Darré always combined the themes of peasant revival with those of mobilization for food production, equating the Volk with an organism dependent on nutrition for survival.

German Academia and Pig Modernization in the Interwar Years: The Emergence of Performance Records