Fascist Pigs: Technoscientific Organisms and the History of Fascism

First, one should consider that similar projects by other countries prove that Nazis were not alone in searching intensively for alternative sources of rubber during World War II. Every major power had a program to increase rubber output, programs that only made sense in the particular conditions of the war. Besides the Soviet case, on which, as mentioned, the Nazi one was built, it is important to acknowledge in particular that the United States made huge investments on research for domestic production of rubber through kok-sagyz. The federal government subsidized experimental work on kok-sagyz in dozens of states, having built a pilot plant near Philadelphia. Besides the multiple problems with pests and weeds, American enthusiasts of the rubber substitute also faced the challenges posed by a plant requiring continuous hand care. If Nazis relied on Himmler’s control of an immense pool of forced labor to overcome the lack of interest of local peasants to cultivate kok-sagyz, the hiring of migrant workers by American farmers proved that the scheme would be very difficult to implement in the United States: many members of a Jamaican contingent hired to cultivate a kok-sagyz field in Wisconsin refused to work on the cold and rainy autumn days as demanded by the fragile plant.[87] In fact, from June 1944 on, most of the breeding works in the US had stopped. Even under conditions of mobilization for war, the US government did thus not impose the kind of control over labor that the Third Reich did.

Disturbingly enough, this was apparently not true for other European empires. Gaullists mobilized in early 1942 thousands of forced workers for the natural rubber plantations of French Cameroun. In Tanganyika (today Tanzania), in March of 1942, British authorities conscripted about 11,000 indigenous people for periods of twelve months to work on rubber plantations previously owned by Germans.[88] The difference of these cases with the Nazi colonial system is that once the war came to an end both the French and British empires gradually accommodated indigenous demands for better labor conditions and possibilities for social mobility. This didn’t prevent African independence movements; indeed, it may have accelerated them. It was much more than the Nazis had ever offered to the eastern European populations. As was argued above, the colonial trajectories identified by Frederic Cooper that opened historical dynamics in French or British Africa were just not available for fascist empires.

My main argument for taking a close look at kok-sagyz is its ability to reveal the nature of Nazi colonial rule in eastern Europe—that is, the nature of the would-be destiny of those native populations not removed to make space for German settlers. They would either cultivate a cash crop in their own plots for which they would be underpaid and that jeopardized their food security, an arrangement typical of many other colonial situations, or they would be forced to do it in more brutal conditions in SS-managed plantations, a reality that had already disappeared of most European colonies of the time. Auschwitz not only contributed with its gas chambers to realize the Nazis’ dreams of a European continent emptied of Jewish people; it also sustained, through its kok-sagyz seeds, a new colonial order and its forced-labor regime. The apparent minor agriculture projects of the camp call attention to the past colonial future of the Third Reich. They reveal a Nazi New Order in Europe only too familiar in other continents under European colonialism. Rubber production from kok-sagyz never reached significant production levels, but the pure lines with high latex content coming out of Auschwitz made plausible Himmler visions of SS-managed plantations throughout the steppes of eastern Europe, supplying the Reich’s war machine. Himmler’s monstrous dreams originated from his irrational racist ideology, but they were converted into alleged feasible projects by the making and growing of technoscientific organisms, in this case, high-latex kok-sagyz.

Cotton Breeding and Portugal’s Colonial Regime in Mozambique