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.
The Colorado Potato Beetle
Relations between plant pathology and the Nazi reorganization of peasant life as materialized through the RNS were not limited to seed standardization. With the Decree on Plant Protection (Reichspflanzenschutzgesetz) issued in March of 1937, the RNS took over the regional structure of the Plant Protection Offices, previously in the hands of the BRA, and integrated it into Department II of its Organizational Chart—the Farm.[68] The Landesbauernschäfte of the RNS were now the ones that organized and funded each of the 26 Plant Protection Offices and their 350 trained scientists, responsible for the observation, registration, and fighting of plant pests in the fields.[69] The offices were also the regional centers from which leaflets and warnings on menacing pests were spread. Nonetheless, all the collected local observations, bugs included, were to be sent to the BRA in Berlin-Dahlem, which retained its department of plant protection as the center of the entire structure reinforcing the overlapping of the latter with the structure of the RNS. All these materials were the basis for producing the monthly report issued by the BRA with the spatial distribution in the country of the different plant pathologies. The progress of the Colorado potato beetle—one of the most feared pests of the potato crop—from the French territory into Germany was followed carefully in the 1930s.[70] In addition to publishing maps showing the front line of the beetle attack in various periodicals, the BRA had its officers pinpointing on large wall maps the locations where the beetle had been detected.
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,”
68
From 1938 on the offices were funded exclusively by the RNS. See Riehm, “Der Deutsche Pflanzenschutzdienst.”
69
This number for the scientific workforce of the Pflanzenschutzdienst is for 1938 and 1939. Source: Volker Klemm,
70
See, for example, Martin Schwartz, “Der Kartoffelkäfer vor der deutschen Grenze?”