Fascist Pigs: Technoscientific Organisms and the History of Fascism

Scientific research institutes began to play an important role in implementing performance records from the moment these records included measurements of weight gains from feed in addition to fertility statistics. As was noted above, after the traumatic World War I experience, the quantity and quality of feed needed for swine to reach market weight was no minor issue in deciding which animals were the most valuable. But it was hard to ask herd owners to keep painstaking daily records of weight gains under constant conditions. For these more demanding performance tests, known as fattening tests, pigs were moved to Mastleistungsprüfungsanstalten (pig fattening performance testing centers), where they were observed in a controlled environment. The first of these centers was founded in 1925 in Friedland (in Lower Saxony, the main region for breeding Veredelte Landschwein) in connection with the Animal Breeding Institute and Dairy at the University of Göttingen. In 1930 a second center (both for Edelschwein and for Veredelte Landschwein) was created for Saxony in the facilities of the University of Halle at the Lettin property. By 1939 there were fattening performance testing centers in every province of Germany. They were located at the main academic animal-breeding institutes, including the Versuchswirtschaft für Schweinehaltung, -füttterung, und -zucht at Ruhlsdorf, near Berlin; the Institut für Tierzüchtung der Preuss Versuchs- und Forschunganstalt Kraftborn, in Silesia; the Institut für Tierzucht- und Molkereiwesen der Universität Bonn in the Rhineland; the Anstalt für Tierzucht und Milschwirtschaft der Universität Jena, in Thuringia; and the Institut für Milcherzeugung der Preuss Versuchs- und Forschunganstalt Kiel, in Schleswig-Holstein.[48] The list illustrates the intertwinement of academic and commercial breeding operations.

The work of Jonas Schmidt, the pioneer of fattening testing in Germany and the head of the Göttingen Institute, is helpful for understanding the conflation of the academy and the practical world that the fattening performance tests brought about. In 1927–28 Schmidt tested 100 boars and 100 sows, all of them veredelte Landschwein, in his fattening performance testing center in Friedland.[49] Four pigs from each litter were taken as a sample at breeders’ farms and brought to Friedland when they reached 10 weeks of age. After two weeks of adaptation to the new environment, the test was begun by feeding the animals barley grist (Gerstenschrot) and 100 grams of fish flour per animal every day. After the first ten weeks of the test they were also given 200 grams of dry yeast. The test was finished when pigs reached a minimum weight of 100 kilograms. Carcass data—fat/meat proportion, weight of main butcher parts (bacon, lard, chops, ham, and so on), and percentage of wasted mass—were recorded after slaughter of three of the four littermates. After testing sufficient number of animals, it was possible to establish a standard of performance for veredelte Landschwein.

The aim was to identify the bloodlines with better fattening performance—those that made more with less—and to eliminate the ones that performed poorly. In subsequent years, Jonas Schmidt and the scientists working in Germany’s animal-breeding institutes would dedicate much of their work to establishing performance standards for the most important commercial breeds (veredelte Landschwein and Edelschwein) against which to measure the animals tested at the various centers. They hoped to offer commercial breeders clear criteria for evaluating their animals.

For the scientists the advantages of systematic testing were no less obvious: they now had access to data on a large number of animals tested under controlled conditions. The data in articles published in the 1930s and the 1940s in academic journals such as Züchtungskunde and Zeitschrift für Tierzüchtung und Zücthungsbiologie, which both had Jonas Schmidt as editor in chief, were from repeated testing at the pig fattening performance testing centers.[50] Academics such as Jonas Schmidt and Gustav Frölich thus contributed to making pigs into industrialized organisms bred according to standardized performance tests and, in the same single step, making them into manageable and measurable research objects. In other words, they extended the laboratory space to all of Germany’s commercial pig-breeding operations.[51]

^{Figure 4.4 A record of fattening performance.}

^{(Jonas Schmidt, Joachim Kliesch, and Viktor Goerttler, Lehrbuch der Schweinezucht. Züchtung, Ernährung, Haltung, und Krankheiten des Schweines, Paul Parey, 1941)}

Performance Tests and the Nazi Bureaucracy