Fascist Pigs: Technoscientific Organisms and the History of Fascism

The scale of the mass killing at Auschwitz-Birkenau justifiably diverted historians’ attention from the agricultural dimensions of the place. But it shouldn’t be forgotten that the original plan for the conversion of the area into an exemplary rural area was not put aside when it also became an industrial site and an extermination camp. During the entire lifetime of the camp, inmates, mainly women, with total lack of machines and under the hardest imaginable conditions, secured riverbanks, dredged fishponds, dug drainage ditches, and cleared tree stumps in cultivation fields. The violence involved was unbearable. Rebellions were suppressed by means of mass executions. This book doesn’t have anything to add to the descriptions of forced labor and death at Auschwitz. But it does want to emphasize that the agricultural dimension is a crucial one to understand the nature of the place and its role in the Nazi empire. For Zygmunt Bauman, the Nazi modernist state assumed the role of the gardener, cutting here, trimming there, and cleansing the place of menacing pests, with people in place of plants.[77] But agriculture was more than just a metaphor; it embodied the Nazi empire, built on mass killing and over exploitation of “inferior races.” The ethnic cleansing of eastern Europe was a first step in the building of Nazi alternative modernity to which German rural settlements were central. Auschwitz not only made space for German settlers by eliminating Jewish populations in its gas chambers; it also provided the technological infrastructure for German expansion in its role as “Agricultural Experiment Station for the East.”[78]

As Mussolini, Hitler also insisted that his empire was different from previous ones due to its insistence on settlement and Lebensraum. But the main agriculture project undertaken at Auschwitz, the cultivation of kok-sagyz, wasn’t directed at German settlers. In addition, it relied on underpaid or forced indigenous labor, an arrangement common to all other European empires, fascist Italy included, as we just saw. After Himmler’s first visit to Auschwitz in March 1941, he ordered the further extension of the camp, emptying seven villages of Polish inhabitants, Rajsko among them. The 3,800 hectares of this sub-camp (Nebenlager) would include, besides the SS Hygiene Institute, a poultry farm, a facility for animal breeding for biomedical research, a pond for fish breeding, a vegetable garden, an orchard, and a plant-breeding unit. In the beginning, inmates would walk back and forth daily the 3 kilometers from Rajsko to Auschwitz main camp, but in June 1943 two new barracks were built to house the female workers of the gardening and plant-breeding commandos. Although these had no running water, the conditions were much better than in Birkenau, with easy access to fresh food and, decisively, without the physical punishments that reigned in the main camp. Discipline among the detainees was in fact enforced by menacing transfers to Birkenau.[79]

We don’t know many details about all those agricultural projects at Auschwitz, but the story of breeding of a rubber substitute is well documented.[80] The plant-breeding practices undertaken at the Rajsko camp don’t seem too different from the undertakings dealt with in previous chapters in other agricultural experiment stations, with the obvious distinguishing notorious feature of the use of female forced labor for conducting experiments. In 1945 the Commando Plant Breeding of the camp counted with 150 female inmates, under the direction of Joachim Caesar, an SS Obersturmbannführer with a doctorate from the University of Halle and who had headed the Training Office of the SS Racial and Settlement Main Office.[81] The aim was to produce, through pedigree breeding, pure lines of kok-sagyz with roots with high latex content, multiply them, and research optimal cultivation conditions.[82] Seeds were first sown in a greenhouse from which plants were reproduced through vegetative means from cuttings from the root section. Each woman was responsible for gathering the data from 1,000 plants: date of first leaves, size of leaves, date of flowering, size and quantity of flowers, and date of first seed. The more promising exemplars were reproduced through inbreeding and gathered in protected individual 20-by-20-centimeter boxes covered with tulle to avoid cross-pollination.