Fascist Pigs: Technoscientific Organisms and the History of Fascism

This book doesn’t explore the important gender dimensions involved in plant breeding and the repeated references to the alleged advantages of employing women in practices demanding careful handling and precise registration. But it should be noticed how gender and labor interact in this story: while men were used as forced labor in the industrial IG Farben chemical complex, women were the gardeners and computers of the plant-breeding operations. Auschwitz reproduced the gendered colonial labor division at work of the Third Reich beyond the area delimited by barbed wire: while men were rounded by Sauckel’s forced-labor operation to work in German industries, women (as well as children) were put in barracks adjacent to SS-managed rubber plantations. Significantly, this was a division also common in European colonies in Africa, with women forced to cultivate cash crops while men were rounded seasonally by the colonial state to work in road building or in mining.

^{Figure 5.4 Physiological analysis of rubber rich kok-sagyz root.}

^{(Jahresbericht 1942/43 der Gruppe Züchtung, Bundesarchiv, NS 19/3919)}

^{Figure 5.5 Experimental plots of kok-sagyz at the Rajsko subcamp, part of the Auschwitz complex, 1943–44.}

^{(Bundesarchiv, Bild 146–2007–0095)}

I insisted above on the importance of registration practices for plant breeding and one would think forced labor would be particularly prone to the repetitive, monotonous, and tiresome job involved in producing pure lines. Interestingly enough, the inmates’ oral accounts of sabotage referred the easiness of making all the effort irrelevant by just messing with the records of each plant.[83] As terrorists identify the critical points of an infrastructure, so the inmates had no doubts about the centrality of keeping good records for scientific plant-breeding operations. We don’t know the actual dimension of the sabotage, but it seems that even in an over controlled space as the one of the concentration camp it was impossible to follow each single move of the inmates.

The best lines were transferred to the cultivation fields outside the greenhouse to investigate growing conditions and to reproduce enough seed to be distributed among different experimental plots across eastern Europe to test behavior under diverse environments. Local agricultural experiment stations were responsible for the adaptation of Auschwitz breeding lines in the different occupied areas.[84] Also, a few farmers were chosen for reproducing seed from supplies dispensed by Auschwitz that would then be distributed to the actual cultivation sites. In the opposite direction, if the first seeds had arrived in Auschwitz through the plundering of Soviet breeders previous efforts, each Sondernführer was now to send back to Auschwitz the most promising kok-sagyz plants found in their fields.[85] As in the other cases dealt with above, Auschwitz can be perceived as a center of circulation, with seeds coming in and out through which it sustained colonial plantations providing the empire with key raw materials through the exploitation of indigenous labor force.

Historians may will to insist that stories such as the one of Nazi rubber substitute only prove the irrationality of Himmler and the Nazi elite in general, describing it as “purely a matter of prestige,” characteristic of figures always more concerned with grandiose visions than with effective results.[86] The doubtful historical relevance of kok-sagyz seems confirmed as well by the meager results of the endeavor, for no more than a few hundreds of tons were ever delivered to the Reich. I would like to contend that such metrics of success and failure, a metrics put in place by the very same historical actors, doesn’t account for the significance of the case in question. The historical importance of kok-sagyz doesn’t prove the alleged irrationality of the Nazi regime. It shows instead the scandalous continuities of Nazi colonial Europe with colonial situations in Africa.