Ritual celebrations of the harvest day, with peasants dressed in allegedly traditional costumes happily dancing old Germanic dances and celebrating the annual pig slaughter on their hereditary farms, have led many scholars to quickly dismiss Blut und Boden as the folkloric side of Nazi ideology, or as the pastoral component of Nazism. And even among historians who have explored the role of agriculture in Nazi Germany in more depth there is a clear tendency to consider its main ideologue, Richard Walther Darré, as an outdated character willing to build an impossible rural arcadia in modern times, soon to be replaced by more technocratic and pragmatic Nazi officers such as Herbert Backe.[46] An uncomfortable contradiction arises from scholarship simultaneously dealing with Darré as the embodiment of Nazi antimodernist reaction and with his role as Reichsbauernführer, the top of the pyramid of the all-embracing RNS bureaucratic structure.
The Reischsnährstand, founded in September 1933, the first year of Nazi rule, was supposed to play a major role in freeing Germany from its dependence on imported food. According to Clifford Lovin’s still-apt characterization, the RNS was “designed to relieve the farmer of the uncertainties of a capitalist market economy so he could serve his nation better both as food producer and culture bearer.”[47] And the truth is that the setting up of this organization, taking over the numerous pre-existent associations and societies of agriculture in Germany, by establishing fixed prices and controlling production, marked the end of the free market for agriculture in the country.[48] This Food Estate was built as a “self-governing corporate body” that rejected the atomizing and destructive influences of democracy and liberalism and promoted the estates (Stände) as “the organizational form of the economic aspect of the life of each individual.”
To ensure that production developed as efficiently as was possible, the RNS extended its control and supervision to every farm in the country. In about 55,000 German villages an Ortsbauernführer was responsible for overseeing day-to-day activities. The Ortsbauernführer reported to 541 Kreisbauernführer, who in turn reported to one of the 19 Landesbauernführer. The local leaders were to execute the policies set at the RNS headquarters in Berlin, and Darré gave them authority to punish those who violated regulations.[49] Supervision was facilitated from 1936 on by the introduction of a record card for every holding larger than 5 hectares that required the occupier to provide exhaustive details. A copy was then held by the Kreisbauernführer. More than 2 million holdings, comprising about 90 percent of all agricultural land, were included in this new system.
And the structure wasn’t directed only at controlling farms; it also included credit cooperatives from which farmers obtained funds to buy their annual stock of seed and fertilizers, the cooperatives and merchants to whom the farmers delivered their produce, and the dairies, mills, and factories that processed food for consumption in the cities.[50] Vertical unions (Hauptvereinigungen) included every individual involved in the production, processing, or sale of one crop (grain, potatoes, sugar, cattle, milk, and so on). These unions regulated production quotas, set grading requirements, and could prevent the creation of new enterprises. The Food Estate reached an enrollment of about 17 million members, which made it the biggest of all the organizations of the Nazi regime. Historians’ common obsession with revealing the many flaws of the RNS has led to repeatedly underestimate its contribution in expanding the infrastructural power and the reach of the Nazi state.[51] It is not just that the RNS was quite successful in increasing production and reducing at the same time food imports, making German agriculture much more self-sufficient than it had been before the Nazis seized power. The point is more about missing the importance of the RNS in institutionalizing Nazism as a regime. It should be hard to dismiss the significance of an organization that exercised more or less direct control over more than 25 percent of Germany’s GDP and constituted the largest economic unit in the world.[52]
How, then, can we reconcile the portrayal of Darré as the radical conservative author of Das Bauerntum als Lebensquell der nordischen Rasse (1929) and Neuadel aus Blut und Boden (1930), two books that contributed to making his name on the extreme right and that would justify his position as one of the chief ideologues of the Nazi Party, with this gigantic bureaucratic arrangement aimed at bringing a new order to the German fields by standardizing farmers’ procedures? If historians insist in offering an image of Darré as no more than a Medieval nostalgic aching for an organic society built on estates (Stände), they should at least incorporate the qualifications introduced in 1940 by a sharp observer of the corporatist phenomenon in Nazi Germany: “There is little that is feudal and much that is anti-feudal in the method of creation, the internal life and the purposes of the 1940 streamlined Stände.”[53] Let us keep that suggestive formulation of the “streamlined Estate” in mind when we explore the relations between the RNS and the BRA—between the Nazi regime and science.
After the Nazis seized power, the seed market, like everything else related to agriculture, would be centrally regulated. A meeting held in December 1933 between RNS officials and BRA scientists was to clarify the respective tasks considering plant protection, the first assuming all responsibilities in economic issues and the latter exclusively scientific ones.[54] In practical terms this meant the transfer of control of the regional network of local Plant Protection Offices from the BRA to the RNS. Such change was also a reaction to repeated criticisms concerning BRA activities by Erwin Baur, a major German geneticist and the first director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institut für Züchtungsforschung (Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Plant Breeding), who urged the BRA to make a choice between being a bureaucratic office and being a research institute. Baur argued that the BRA couldn’t have it both ways.[55] Baur had it wrong, for that was just what happened.
Eduard Riehm—the director of the BRA from Otto Appel’s retirement in 1933 till 1945, whose administration thus coincided with the life span of the Nazi regime—reacted to the reproach by invoking Baur’s privileged connections to H. Dietrich, former agriculture minister of the Reich from 1928 to 1930 and member of the left-leaning German Democratic Party (Deutsche Demokratische Partei). Riehm called Baur a “badischen Demokrat” and promised to align the BRA with the new order, well in tune with his membership in the NSDAP.[56] And in truth the idealized neat separation between bureaucratic and scientific spheres in plant protection during the Nazi years was, as we shall see, meaningless. Riehm, in 1936, was the first to assert the major role of his institution at the service of the Battle of Production.[57]
The Seed Decree of March 1934 confirms the importance of seed circulation for the streamlined RNS. The creation of a standardized certifying system and the prevention of selling uncertified seed, overseen by local branches of the RNS, contributed to the varietal cleansing of the market that allegedly was leading to the steep increases in yield demanded by the Battle for Production. In the apparent strict division of economic and scientific tasks between the RNS and the BRA, this regulation of the seed market clearly fell under the jurisdiction of the RNS. Nevertheless, what happened was that the previous Varietal Registry Commission of the BRA in Berlin-Dahlem was simply renamed the Office for Varietal Registration (Sortenregisterstelle) of the RNS, keeping its incumbency of producing the List of Approved Varieties now to be enforced by RNS officers.[58] In addition, these RNS officers were also trained at the BRA in short courses on seed certification.[59] Instead of just spreading the list among the members of the DLG, as had been done before the Nazis seized power, the list was now distributed through the extended network of the RNS.[60] More important, this was not just a service for better informing peasants about the best breeds. RNS officials used it instead to confirm which breeds could be cultivated in the national soil and which breeds could not. Apparently there was no resistance to having part of the RNS bureaucratic structure inside the BRA.
We now have a clearer picture of the entanglements between the work undertaken at the BRA and the institutionalization of the RNS. The control by the latter of the German seed circuit was built on standards developed in the laboratories of the first. Without the sprout test developed by BRA researchers in connection with the research on wart disease, there would have been no biological basis for the RNS’s varietal list. The RNS could undertake seed cleansing as an important part of its Battle for Production thanks to the sprout tests conducted by the BRA.
The fact that a seed decree was issued no more than a year into Nazi rule merits reflection. Comparing it briefly with the American case may illuminate what was at stake. The US Plant Patent Act, issued in 1930, concluded a long-term lobbying effort by nurserymen to have their innovations protected by legal rights.[61] It was passed as a typical Hoover-Republican anti-depression measure, meant to promote innovation by private breeders and thus to save federal money, since until then public institutions did the large majority of breeding work. The patent act applied only to plants reproduced asexually by budding, by grafting, by the rooting of clippings, or by the dividing of bulbs. It was considered that only in these cases was it possible to guarantee the genetic identity of progeny, and that a patent would be meaningless for plants reproduced sexually by pollination and seeds. The Plant Patent Act thus protected innovation first and foremost in fruit and nut trees, vinous fruits (grapes, strawberries, and blueberries), but also in ornamental shrubs, vines, and perennials such as lilacs, peonies, and roses. Quite tellingly, two of the most important plants in the seed market—wheat and corn—were excluded. For these, instead of a commercial patent, a seed certification system had been in place since 1919, with state agencies publishing lists of recommended varieties.[62] Seed dealers were certified by local experiment stations, guaranteeing that seed was genetically pure and that it would grow uniformly and with good germinability. In 1939 the Federal Seed Act was passed to protect farmers from buying unreliable seed and to safeguard “quality seeds from the competition of less worthy alternatives—and thus [protect] the intellectual property investment that produced the quality.”[63]
The German seed decree seems a combination of the American Plant Patent Act and the American Seed Act. In Germany, commercial varieties entering the Reichssortenlist had their intellectual rights protected. The list guaranteed for the first time some sort of protection to German commercial breeders of their creations, in the form of license fees from farmers who sold replanted versions of original varieties. The similarities may suggest that we are only talking of general modernization processes. But the differences were indeed relevant. The BRA scientists were emphatic about the distances of the system they created from the issuing of a patent, noting that commercial breeders could not release in the market new products if the BRA had not confirmed their value for the Battle of Production.[64] It was not enough for a commercial breeder to develop a new variety. The BRA could exclude it from the list for not complying with wart-resistance standards. Indeed, of the approximately 120 new varieties sent in annually by commercial breeders to the BRA for approval, only a few got onto the list. By 1938 the list included only 64 varieties.[65] In other words, it was not for the market to decide the value of a variety; such value was defined at the BRA in accordance with the general food policy of the regime as established by the RNS.
But the most interesting difference may lie in the fact that the American Plant Patent Act explicitly excluded potatoes from its realm of application. In the German case, potatoes, as we saw, were actually the origin of the seed decree. The justification in the US for excluding potatoes, although they are also reproduced asexually trough tuber propagation, was their availability everywhere and the easiness with which the patent could be infringed and the consequent discredit of the entire plant patent system.[66] According to the American promoters of the Plant Patent Act, there was just no way of enforcing breeders’ rights in the case of potatoes. Well, that was exactly what the extended territorial structure of the RNS offered in Germany: a surveillance system that guaranteed the enforcement of the seed decree. In 1937 the Nazi propaganda of the Battle for Production boasted that at least 80 percent of the commercialized seed potatoes in Germany were wart-resistant certified potatoes.[67] Only those potatoes that kept to the resistance standards established by the BRA deserved to be cultivated in German soil. The weeding out of hundreds of potato traditional varieties from German fields is eloquent enough testimony to the misleading characterization of Darré’s Reichsnährstand as an institution resisting modern science and technology.
The contrasts are indeed illuminating. In both countries commercial breeders were the first obvious beneficiaries of the plant patents and seed decrees. But in Nazi Germany the BRA, through its standards, ensured that their commercial releases were aligned with the regime’s food policies as expressed in the Battle of Production. In addition, potatoes were at the core of the German system, something that made sense only because a centralized state infrastructure such as the RNS controlled the entire seed market.
48
Although many Nazi spokesmen were quick to dismiss the similarities between their regime and the Italian fascist corporatist state, it is hard to miss the importance of corporativism in the creation of the RNS. Robert Ley, for example, acknowledged in 1935 that his Labor Front was not in accordance with the Italian and Austrian inspired 25th point of the party program, which demanded a organic construction of the state based on a organization by estates. Taylor Cole, “Corporative organization of the Third Reich,”
49
Such delegation of power was challenged in the Reichsgericht, but according to Clifford Lovin’s account Darré’s action was upheld. See Lovin, “Agricultural organization in the Third Reich,” p. 457.
50
These formed Department Three of the RNS bureaucracy—Der Markt (Market). The other two departments were Mensch (Men, Women, Youth Schooling, Resettlement…) and Hof (Soil and Plants, Animals, Machinery, Forestry…).
51
Fortunately, Tooze, in
52
These figures clearly call for a revision of the role of corporatism in the Nazi state. If corporatism in Germany is usually dismissed because of top-down control of the estates by the state, the same reasoning would also apply to the Italian fascist corporatist state and Salazar’s New State. The distortions of corporatist ideology shouldn’t mean its dismissal as important historical factor.
57
E. Riehm, “Die Biologische Reichsanstalt für Land- und Forstwirtschaft in Berlin-Dahlem,”
60
Jonathan Harwood makes the important point of the limited coverage of the system by noting that the print run of the list was of no more than 110,000, which indicates that many peasant farmers were not reached. See Harwood, “Fate of peasant-friendly plant breeding,” p. 583.
61
Here I follow closely Glenn E. Bugos and Daniel J. Kevles, “Plants as intellectual property: American practice, law, and policy in world context,”
62
Jack Ralph Kloppenburg,
65
F. Spennemann,
67
Such numbers refer to commercialized seed potato; they don’t correspond to the actual potatoes being cultivated, as farmers could themselves easily reproduce potatoes from previous years. See O. Schlumberger, “Die Erzeugung krebsfester anerkannter Pflanzkartoffeln in den Jahren 1934 und 1935,”