Fascist Pigs: Technoscientific Organisms and the History of Fascism

The Battle for Production and the Four-Year Plan aim at achieving nutritional independence and eliminating the import of raw materials. For this objective are especially important the closing of the gap in fat supply, protein production, and the provisioning of textile fabrics. An increase in the number of domestic animals is a narrow answer to the challenge. Much more important is the increase of their performance through rooted in the soil (bodenständig) and food efficient races and types.[103]

^{Figure 4.8 Herbert Backe and Nazi agricultural leaders contemplating pigs in Wartheland, 1943.}

^{(Zeitschrift für Schweinezucht 50, no. 1, 1943)}

The challenge was to increase fat and protein production through animals avoiding fodder imports from abroad. In fact, animal nutrition was no minor subject for academic breeders such as Frölich, Kronacher, Schmidt, and Zorn. They all experimented intensively with diet and breeds combinations, testing the nutritional values of domestic feeds and publishing recipes to be distributed among peasants by the RNS in the framework of the extensive propaganda effort of the Battle of production and the Four-Year Plan.[104] Frölich and his Halle colleague Luthge, for example, came out with a ration of two thirds of a pound of fishmeal, a tenth of a pound of soybean meal, and a third of a pound of rye per head per day, plus all the potatoes the pigs would eat.[105] The aims were clear. First there was the need of diverting grains, in which Germany was far from being self-sufficient, from animal feeding into human nutrition, a move made possible through the increased use in animal diets of potatoes as well as turnips and sugar beet, of which the country had plenty. After the sharp increase in the price of rye instituted by the RNS in 1935 to ensure grain supply for human consumption, pigs began to be fed overwhelmingly on potatoes.[106] Second, the importing of protein concentrates used in the early phases of pigs development—when a diet rich in tubers is not adequate—was rationed, which led not only to diminishing the amount of intake but also to a push for the use of ersatz feed produced from fish.[107] One of the important results coming out of the research group on animal breeding led by Jonas Schmidt, and put together for the Four-Year Plan by the Forschungsdienst, was the determination of a new protein minimum intake for pigs’ early development phases significantly lower than the one normally used by German pig herders.[108]

And scientists and breeders were not the only actors involved. An important part of the effort of the RNS in the Battle of Production was to promote the use of tubers in pigs’ diets, making them more rooted in the soil. The pages of the Zeitschrift für Schweinezucht, the journal of the RNS-controlled association of swine breeders, publicized all sorts of steaming equipment that could simultaneously be used in the household and in the cooking of potatoes for swine feeding, given the fact that raw potatoes are not proper feed for animals. Also, the RNS pushed through the near-universal adoption of the storage of cooked potatoes at every peasant holding so as to guarantee that there would be enough feed for animals during the winter months. The standard RNS model for small households was a pit silo built by digging a four-foot-deep trench, covering its walls with flat sheet iron surrounded by straw and supported by six-foot-long posts sunk obliquely into the ground. After two to four weeks of storage, steamed potatoes were ready to be fed to pigs. Large farms instead made use of driers producing potato flakes, which had a slightly higher nutritional value. To increase the rootedness in the soil of German swine, housewives were mobilized to use all the leftovers from their kitchens to fatten them. By 1936 the RNS had distributed about 18 million “Fight the waste” postcards for women to use in their private correspondence.

^{Figure 4.9 Encouraging housewives to mobilize for pig feeding.}

^{(Zeitschrift für Schweinezucht 44, no. 25, 1937)}