Fascist Pigs: Technoscientific Organisms and the History of Fascism

Partisan presence in the occupied regions significantly hindered cultivation activities. Quoting agriculture officials of the local Nazi civilian administration, Stahl estimated that 15 percent of farmland in the Ukraine was situated in areas menaced by partisans, compromising production predictions for the year 1944.[66] Such comments were of course made before Germany’s evacuation of much of the region in autumn 1943. As is well known, Himmler responded with a heavy hand. Immediately after Hermann Göring—the head of the Four-Year Plan—confirmed Himmler as Plenipotentiary for Plant Rubber on 9 July, 1943, he ordered the entire population of the partisan-infested areas of northern Ukraine and Byelorussia to be cleared out.[67] The depopulated lands were now a tabula rasa to be occupied by state-owned plantations for the cultivation of kok-sagyz. Himmler was also convinced that the destruction of a field of kok-sagyz—a tuber that had to be uprooted- was much more difficult for partisans than to sabotage grain fields. Instead of the previous system of “natives” working their own plots, the plan for these areas along the Ukraine/Byelorussia border was to establish labor camps for women and children, adjacent to kok-sagyz plantations managed by the SS. Women and children’s hands were considered more suited to the weeding and harvesting associated with cultivation of kok-sagyz. Insofar as this was a plant exotic to eastern Europe and that only recently had been domesticated, it is no surprise to find out the need of painstaking work involved in its cultivation. The colonial repertoire invoked in this case is that of the traditional plantation, with forced labor living in communal barracks working for the colonial master. The incentive system for these laborers was substantially different from the one used to lure local peasants to cultivate their own land. The best collectors were to be awarded used shoes, suitcases, and razors by the local SS supervisor. Himmler even asked Oswald Pohl, the responsible for the economic administration of the SS, about the possibility of offering watches as prizes to the best collectors.[68]

Either in SS-managed monocrop plantations or in areas in which kok-sagyz divided space with other crops in local peasants’ plots, the first targets for partisan activities were the Landwirtschaftsführer (agricultural leaders) in charge of controlling cultivation. According to Stahl’s account, from November 1942 to May 1943 one of the economic commandos operating in northern Ukraine had already lost 18 of its Landwirtschaftsführer. Higher in the hierarchy were the Sondernführer, agriculture experts responsible for technical advice, propaganda, and overseeing the distribution and collection of seed and roots in each of the 66 cultivation districts (Bezirk). Crucially enough, they controlled the recollection of seeds and the storage of roots and produced maps detailing production and areas under cultivation. Overseeing the entire system for each of the four cultivation regions into which conquered eastern Europe had been divided—Warthegau, Danzig, Westpreussen (I); Mitte (II); Ukraine West (III); Ukraine East (IV)—were the regional directors (Leiter der Anbaubereiche).[69] Typical of Nazi colonial administration in the east, this rigid hierarchy built around rubber production was oiled with personal gifts of liquor and cigars.[70]

In February 1943, Oswald Pohl communicated Himmler that the plans for 1944 were to increase production of rubber from kok-sagyz to 8,000 ton, corresponding to an area under cultivation of about 100,000 hectares.[71] This was far from the 400,000 hectares Hitler bragged about in 1941. Things would only tend to get worse, with the Third Reich shrinking at fast pace after the Soviet counterattack and the increasing difficulty of finding indigenous labor. This was apparent in one of the largest plantations directly managed by the Cultivation and Trials Department of Himmler’s Rubber Plant Group of the Four-Year Plan, the Jagielnica estate in the district of Czortkcow in Galicia. About 300 Jewish camp inmates were employed to cultivate its 1,570 hectares in 1942–43. But after repeated demands to increase the number of forced laborers to 1,500 by the SS estate managers trying to pressure the authorities of the General Government to dispense some of their Jewish inmates, this was refused by a clear lack of local manpower.[72] These rivalries and difficulties in coordinating among local government, the SS, and Sauckel’s labor roundups, are well known among historians of Nazi occupation of the east. In spite of constant mentioning of efficiency by the perpetrators of the Holocaust, colonial machines tend in fact to be messy. That was also the case of one of the central elements of the entire system of rubber production—Auschwitz.