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^{Figure 2.8 The National Agricultural Experiment Station, ca. 1940.}

^{(Fundo Mário Novais, Art Library of the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation)}

The National Agricultural Experiment Station was a crucial element of this “futurism of the past.”[108] More than the architecture of its building, the institution reproduced fascist life at a scale even larger than the one of Ferro’s Propaganda Secretariat. The technoscientific organisms that came out of the station materialized that “futurism of the past” by sustaining and expanding large estates in Alentejo, by providing a basis for a campaign for bread self-sufficiency, by bringing together wheat fields and chemical industries, and by enabling the first corporatist structures of the New State.

^{Figure 2.9 A photograph (ca. 1947) of the office of António Ferro, the New State’s head of propaganda, combining streamlined Portuguese pre-modern traditions with modernist furniture and carpet. Note the portrait of Salazar on the cabinet.}

^{(Fundo Mário Novais, Art Library of the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation)}

3 Potatoes: Pests, Plant Breeding, and the Growth of the Nazi State

World War I Famines and Potatoes

It is only appropriate that a discussion of things rooting Germans in the national soil focus on potatoes. In 1934, one year into Nazi rule, about 47 million tons of potatoes were harvested in Germany, whereas the joint output of all grains (wheat, rye, barley, and oats) amounted to 21 million tons.[1] In the 1930s Germany raised more potatoes than any other country on only 15 percent of its cultivable land.[2] When Reichsbauernführer (Reich peasant leader) Richard Walther Darré, the main ruralist ideologue of the regime, following the Italian example, launched the Battle for Production (Erzeugungsschlacht), in November of 1934, potatoes were given a crucial role in freeing Germany from world markets.[3]

The Nazis insisted on food independence (Nahrungsfreiheit) as a necessary condition for both the biological survival of the race and its political independence.[4] The motto “Blut und Boden” (“Blood and soil”) asserted that peasants rooted in the soil constituted the “blood source of the German people.” Because potatoes were among the few staples that the German soil produced in sufficient quantities, they became important to the rootedness of the national community envisaged by the Nazis. Potatoes made up roughly 12 percent of an average German diet, and consumption of them had to increase if the Volk wished to become independent of foreign food sources. Nazi propaganda produced by Darré’s bureaucracy urged housewives to include potatoes in every possible recipe, making it clear that Germans were “children of the potato.”[5]

And potatoes didn’t only feed humans. Pigs consumed more than half of the potatoes produced in Germany. A significant increase in productivity in potato cultivation also meant diminishing imports of animal feed, the main source of concern for those aiming at sustaining Germans on produce from the national soil. To win the Battle for Production, the nutritional basis of both pig farming and dairy farming had to be radically changed toward domestically produced feeds, thus placing higher demands on Germany’s potato crop.

^{Figure 3.1 Peasant leaders (Bauernführer) from all regions of Germany parading through the streets of Berlin.}

^{(Achim Thiele and Kurt Goeltzer, Deutsche Arbeit im Vierjahresplan, Gerhard Stalling, 1933)}

One didn’t have to be a knowledgeable reader of the Reich’s trade statistics to understand what was at stake. Historians of fascism have rightly put great emphasis on comradeship forged in the trenches during World War I when explaining the rise of violent paramilitary movements. In earlier chapters, I did just that in exploring the military connotations of the Ardito breed of wheat and the connections of the Portuguese Wheat Campaign with the experience in the trenches of Linhares de Lima and Pequito Rebelo. But it is good to emphasize that it was also the war that made all the peasant talk of Nazi leaders, such as Hitler’s assertion that “the future of the nation… depends exclusively on the conservation of the peasant,” sound plausible. In the 1930s the vast majority of German adults had had acute personal experiences of hunger.[6] The British and French blockade during the 1914–1918 conflict and its malnutrition effects were blamed for killing about 600,000 Germans and Austrians and were thought to have caused social turmoil and to have hastened the surrender of the Second Reich.[7] In the war’s aftermath, the Nazis repeated ad nauseam the assertion that internal betrayal by Bolsheviks and Jews had led to the defeat by the German Army—in Hitler’s words, “the biggest treachery of the century.”[8] As the economic historian Adam Tooze asserts in his important revaluation of the role of agriculture in the Nazi regime, “World War I had forced the question of food supply back onto the agenda of European politics.”[9]

^{Figure 3.2 A bread line during World War I.}

^{(Bundesarchiv, Bild 183-R00012 / CC-BY-SA 3.0)}

In connecting food issues to Germany’s defeat in World War I, potatoes played no minor role. Already in the early stages of the war wheat flour was supplemented with potato additives and rye grain to bake the infamous grayish K-bread, the K standing for both ‘Krieg’ (war) and ‘Kartoffel’ (potato).[10] Nonetheless, the catastrophic outbreak of late blight in 1916 on the potato crop would cause K-bread shortages, and the winter of 1917 came to be recalled in Germany’s collective memory as the “turnip winter.”[11] Street riots, strikes, and harsh criticism of the government became common among consumers in Germany’s main cities, allegedly leading to the internal dissent denounced by the Nazis.[12] Potato pests were described as another foreign enemy, demanding the mobilization of populations to fight their presence with heavy use of chemical pesticides.[13] Several authors have highlighted the metaphorical importance of keeping the Fatherland clean from pests and epidemics for the subsequent racial policies of the Nazi state and the dynamics of genocide.[14] The method of this book is instead to keep following the track of plants and animals, avoiding fast transitions from non-humans to humans.

The starvation events of World War I were repeatedly used in subsequent years to justify increasing support for the plant pathology research undertaken at the Biologische Reichsanstalt für Land- und Forstwirtschaft (meaning Biological Imperial Institute for Agriculture and Forestry, and henceforth abbreviated to BRA), the institution responsible for keeping German fields safe from menacing pathogens such as insects, funguses, and bacteria.[15] The BRA was founded in 1898 as a biological section of the Imperial Public Health Office, earning independent status in 1905 as a department of the Ministry of Interior.[16] Its first task was to study the living conditions of pests of cultivated plants, the basis for their elimination, and the development and testing of chemical means to defend crops.[17] Even if Germany would have to wait for the seizure of power by the Nazis and their Battle of Production to implement a plant defense law comparable to the U.S. Plant Quarantine Act (1912), the Canadian Destructive Pest Act (1910), or the English Destructive Insect and Pests Act (1907), the institutionalization of the BRA was well in tune with the pattern of professionalization of plant pathology in most Western countries.[18] Between 1880 and 1910 the majority of governments in Europe and North America were founding state-run services for the research and control of crop diseases.[19] In Germany it was also through the BRA that a service covering the different regions of the Reich was launched in 1903, responsible for collecting statistics on plant pathologies and for offering information and advice to local farmers.[20] The Plant Protection Service (Pflanzenschutzdienst) and its network of local offices (Hauptstellen für Pflanzenschutz) were connected simultaneously to the local structure of the Agriculture Chambers (Landwirtschaftskammern) and to the central administration, with the BRA in Berlin serving as the central node of the entire structure.