During the invasion of Colorado potato beetle in 1914, the Kaiserliche Biologische Anstalt für Land- und Forstwirtschaft, forerunner of the BRA, had already formed a commission, headed by the entomologist Martin Schwartz, that attempted radical eradication of the beetle in the Stade area of Lower Saxony. The use of chemical pesticides such as crude benzene was, not surprisingly, depicted by the press as a military action by Reich soldiers against a foreign army of beetles.[71] In 1934 the enemy was spotted once more in Stade, just 2 kilometers away from the previous site.[72] This time the BRA mobilized 140 people, including students and members of the Reichsarbeitsdienst (Reich Labor Service—the Nazi equivalent of depression era relief programs), to undertake successive steps of the campaign: searching, sieving, clearing, and spraying. For each action, divisions (Abteilung) were created, which subsequently were subdivided into columns, each led by one Führer. For a planned search of a potato field, for example, 75 men formed five search columns (Suchtkolonnen), each with fourteen members and one column Führer, or, alternatively, four search columns and three sieving columns. Each column was to advance in an orderly manner, covering the entire field with members separated from one another by a distance of two potato lines. Whenever a beetle was spotted, the attacked plant was marked, the event was registered, and, if possible, the bug was captured and put into a bottle (carried by the column’s Führer) to be sent to Berlin. Clearing and spraying also were done in military style.
The next year, 1935, the presence of the enemy was detected 20 kilometers from the German border in France. That led to the quick creation by the BRA of the Kartoffelkäfer-Abwehrdienst (Office of Defense from the Colorado Potato Beetle)—in the framework, of course, of the RNS structure. A connection between this new office and the local populations was established by a local representative (Vertrauensmann), who had a Colorado Beetle demonstration kit with the bugs in different development stages to instruct the rest of the population.[73] Children were actively involved in the defense strategy, with the BRA designing and distributing school calendars depicting colored images of the insect in its various forms.[74] The first child to detect a beetle in a field was awarded the Kartoffelkäfer-Ehrennadel (Colorado Beetle Honor Medal), and those who spotted the insect again in the same area were offered a Colorado Beetle pin.[75] Women were also mobilized to the effort, which was officially part of the Battle of Production, and were offered short training courses on how to identify the main enemies of the German potato crop.[76] The beetle thus became one of the best-known insects among the whole German population, and the effort to eradicate it became an effective way of getting rural people, children and women included, to participate in the defense of the fatherland. After the issuing of the Plant Protection decree of 1937, participation in search days (Suchtagen), in tight columns as described above, would become mandatory.[77]
By 1941, the BRA claimed to have its campaign against the Colorado Beetle underway in 82 villages and cities in western Germany, the areas more afflicted by the beetle. At least 204,000 hectares had been cleared by the brigades of the Defense Office, which included 88 advisors, 91 office workers, 279 technicians, 97 truck-drivers, 43 co-drivers, 24 mechanics and foremen, and 20 auxiliary men. In the same year, 4,536 training courses were reportedly attended by about 700,000 Germans, 600,000 Alsatians, and 350,000 people from Lorraine.[78] Even if we discount the exaggerated numbers, there is little doubt about the capacity of the Nazis’ plant-protection campaigns to reach large shares of the population.[79] The training courses, the images on children’s calendars, and the demonstration kits all contributed to making the Colorado Beetle into an enemy menacing the survival of the national community. Every finding and subsequent elimination of a beetle was transformed into a significant contribution to the food battle keeping the German race alive. Through such operations everyone was able to feel that he or she was contributing to a major transcendent cause even when performing the apparently humble task of searching a field for bugs. To be sure, many other pest-control campaigns in Germany had invoked the presence of the enemy in national soil and the need to exterminate it by means of chemical warfare. But the high rhetoric of earlier campaigns did not match the mobilization of local populations at such a grand scale as during the Nazi years, involving hundreds of thousands of villagers, women and children included, in a kind of participatory science for the defense of the Fatherland.
Late Blight
Neither wart nor the Colorado Beetle could compete with the significance of late blight, the pest that allegedly had caused Germany’s defeat in World War I. It is thus not surprising that Karl Otto Müller, the scientist responsible for releasing the first breeds of potatoes resistant to late blight, became the most celebrated figure of the Biologische Reichsanstalt für Land- und Forstwirtschaft. Müller was the head of the Genetics and Breeding Section of the Botany Department of the BRA from 1927 to 1945.[80] After his studies at the University of Berlin with such luminaries of genetics as Carl Correns and Eugen Fischer, he went to work for the BRA in 1922 as a research assistant to Josef Broili, who was then in charge of the BRA’s plant-breeding efforts.[81]
In 1911 Broili had obtained from the US Department of Agriculture a number of wild South American Solanum plants which he could not identify precisely and which were subsequently subjected to intense inbreeding. This work established the hybrid character of one of the species and led Broili to label its progeny as F-varieties (the F standing for ‘fraglich’, which means “doubtful”).[82] From the beginning he was interested in exploring the potential of such material to introduce resistance to late blight into commercial varieties.[83] Nevertheless, according to Müller’s own account, World War I and the ensuing difficulties in getting technical assistance hindered Broili’s breeding plans. It was only after Müller’s arrival in 1922 at the BRA that a systematic comparison was made between the F-varieties and commercial ones. That comparison would establish the immunity of the F-varieties to late blight attacks.
71
“Kartoffekäfer Nummer,”
72
R. Langenbuch, “Die Bekämpfung des Kartoffelkäfers in Stade 1934,”
73
Gustav-Adolf Langenbruch, “100 Jahre Pflanzenschutzforschung. Der Kartoffelkäfer in Deutschland,”
74
“Stundenplan mit Darstellung des Kartoffelkäfers für die Aufklärungsarbeit in den Schulen,”
75
“Kartoffekäfer Nummer,”
76
“Schädlingsbekämpfung durch die Bäuerinnen in der Erzeugungsschlacht,”
78
Tätigkeit-Bericht des Verwaltungsamtes des Reichsbauernführer über die Kartoffelkäffer-Bekämpfung im Jahre 1941, BA/R/3602/2450.
79
In subsequent years, owing to a short supply of chemical pesticides, the war would seriously hinder the work of the brigades. The beetle would move eastward throughout the entire German territory, reaching the Elbe in 1945 and the Oder in 1948.
80
In 1936 the other sections of the BRA’s Botany Department were Agriculture Botany (in which all the work on wart was done), Physiological Botany, Anatomical Botany, Plant Breeding and Genetics, and Sorts Research (Sortenkunde) (responsible for establishing the Reichsortenlist)
81
R. Steven Turner has offered a brief account of the role of K. O. Müller in fighting the late blight of potatoes in “After the famine.”
83
K. O. Müller, “Über den augenblicklichen Stand unserer Kenntnisse zur biologischen Spezialisierung des Krautfäuleerregers der Kartoffel (