Fascist Pigs: Technoscientific Organisms and the History of Fascism

Darré’s insistence on revisiting the experience of World War I was preceded by similar exercises by his Halle professor Gustav Frölich, who directed the Institute of Animal Breeding from 1915 to 1940.[19] Insofar as that institute had inaugurated his new facilities in 1914 only two weeks before the outbreak of war, it is not surprising that Frölich was eager to explore the significance of the conflict for German animal breeding. Already in 1916 he was very emphatic on the contrasting challenges the war posed to the fields of animal and plant breeding.[20] If plant breeders could apply during wartime the principles they had been developing in periods of peace to increase the productivity of German fields, animal breeders needed to review the basis of their work. Frölich suggested that they abandon their fixation on “intensive races” and focus instead on adapting animals to the conditions of the different German regions.[21] It didn’t make sense to breed more productive animals when these depended on intensive consumption of scarce fodders, mostly imported from overseas. The vocabulary Frölich used was to be popularized by Darré and by Hitler in the coming years in Nazi meetings. For example: “The English hunger plan imposed the necessity of relying on our native [einheimisch] soil for the nourishment of the people and the army.”[22]

The acute experience of hunger in the war years and its obvious connection to domestic animals provided strong arguments for the institutionalization of animal breeding in German academy. In the war’s aftermath, institutes for animal breeding and dairy sprouted at Giessen (1921), Göttingen (1921), Hohenheim (1923), Leipzig (1922), Jena (1927), Hamburg (1924), and Königsberg (1922).[23] In 1923, Prussia’s government founded the Prussian Experimental and Research Institute for Animal Breeding in Tschechnitz, near Breslau. In the 1920s, the Institute for Animal Breeding of the Berlin Agricultural College would be expanded greatly,[24] as would the Halle Institute for Animal Breeding and Dairy.

Notwithstanding the attention dedicated to cattle and sheep breeding by the Halle Institute, Der Schweinemord brought urgency to the task of remaking the German swine herd.[25] After all, pork was Germans’ main source of protein, and the challenge in the war’s aftermath was, according to Frölich, to breed pigs that didn’t depend so much on imported feed. Academic animal breeders thus assumed the task of directing commercial breeders toward the production of a new type of pig that could thrive on produce from the national soil. Not only were experiments with different diets needed; in addition, it had to be established which breeding lines made more protein and fat with less feed. The Haustiergarten (zoo for domesticated animals) at the University of Halle had been enlarged in 1919 to respond to this increasing interest in feeding.[26] Stables were divided to host individual young swine and designed so that their arrangement could be changed easily if that was necessary for experiments comparing different feeds. In 1917 Frölich justified the acquisition of a large tract of land near Halle, the Domäne Lettin, as an experimental field for his institute with the argument that significant results, with the potential of changing breeding and rearing practices, would require long-term experiments involving a large number of animals.[27] The approximately 200 hectares of the Domäne Lettin were used for the building of model stables for cattle, hogs, and sheep, complemented with cultivated fields of potatoes, sugar beets, fodder beet, hay, wheat, rye, and other crops. The Domäne Lettin, as well as the new facilities of the Haustiergarten, were thus designed to combine research on heredity and research on diets, bringing together animals and soil.

^{Figure 4.3 The zoo for domesticated animals of the Agricultural Institute of the University of Halle, 1888 (source unknown).}

The constituency of the board formed to manage the Domäne Lettin is revealing of the different interests being weaved together by the Halle scientists after World War I. It included, besides the director of the Halle Institute of Animal Breeding, representatives of the University of Halle, the Ministry of Science, the Ministry of Agriculture, the Prussian Society of Agricultural Research, the associations of animal breeders of the province of Saxony, and the chamber of agriculture of Saxony,[28] seeking a balance between national and local scales as well as a balance between the academic sphere and more practical concerns. Not only the Ministry of Science and the Ministry of Agriculture but also commercial animal breeders (through their associations) were to have a say in the conduct of research.