Fascist Pigs: Technoscientific Organisms and the History of Fascism

Taking into account the limitations of Buna production, hopes turned to Taraxacum kok-sagyz, a dandelion-like plant that Soviet plant breeders had been working with since the early 1930s.[47] The availability of kok-sagyz in the Soviet Union was a result of one of Nikolai Vavilov’s expeditions to central Asia in the Tien Shan Mountains, where local people were seen chewing its root. The third Soviet Five-Year Plan would make big investments in cultivating it and in establishing a network of experiment stations from Siberia to Uzbekistan to Byelorussia leading to Stalin bragging by the end of the 1930s that “there is everything in our country but rubber. But after a couple of year we’ll have that too.”[48] German plant breeders were quick to identify the importance of the undertaking and followed Russian efforts closely. In subsequent years they would seize the opportunity opened up by Nazi invasion of the east to plunder Soviet experiment stations and transfer to Germany all kok-sagyz plants and seeds they could find. Much of the research on kok-sagyz undertaken at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute of Plant Breeding in Berlin was based on taking over the Soviet research program.[49]

Susanne Heim has eloquently narrated this kok-sagyz story in her important volume on plant breeding at the Kaiser Wilhelm institutes during the Nazi years.[50] In this text I make use of archival sources already used by Heim: Himmler’s papers at the Bundesarchiv in Berlin. While Heim revealed the opportunism of scientists in grabbing up the possibilities opened by Nazi rule, I am more interested in revisiting these sources to interpret them through the lenses of colonial history. Indeed, when looking at the archival sources, one may see the similar issues faced by the actors involved in the Nazi rubber story and those in colonial labor regimes. This shouldn’t be surprising, for the issue at stake was no other than rubber, one of the classic ingredients of imperialism, the subject of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, epitome of European colonial violence in Africa.[51] As Mark Mazower has already suggested, and as Nazi rubber confirms, the history of the twentieth century fully justifies the description of Europe as a “Dark Continent.”[52]

In the summer of 1941 Hitler demanded that 400,000 hectares should be reserved for rubber plants cultivation in the invaded areas of the east to meet German needs. Following the Führer’s will, kok-sagyz was to be intensively explored in the war years as a substitute for natural rubber. Hans Stahl’s report of May 13, 1943, written after his expedition through the Ukraine as head of Himmler’s new office as Plenipotentiary for All Issues Related to Plant Rubber, is revealing of the colonial nature of kok-sagyz.[53] Stahl, a Navy officer, had been chosen because of his previous experience of heading the Krupp subsidiaries in northern Caucasus and of his fluency in Russian. His main task was to travel in the new conquered lands to inquire about the possibilities of extending kok-sagyz cultivation areas. In this first report he expressed his joy with the fulfillment of the target of 25,640 hectares planted with kok-sagyz for the Ukraine for the year 1943. Stahl emphasized the fact that this was done at about 6,700 farms, on each of which about 3½ hectares were planted with kok-sagyz.