We know that Darré attended the classes of both Frölich and Roemer at Halle, and also those of the paleontologist Johannes Walther.[5] And though it is never easy for biographers to establish what remained in college students’ heads from materials taught in lectures, there is no reason to doubt Darré’s own account of the profound effects of those three scientists on his enduring interest in everything related to heredity.[6]
In particular, it is hard to overlook the fact that Darré worked as a “voluntary assistant” under Frölich from February to June 1925, dealing with the problem of the different patterns governing color inheritance of Cornwall and Berkshire hogs. Darré explored the possibility that the explanation for such differences was to be found in the diverse histories of domestication of the different breeds, which constituted the basis of his essay “Die Domestikation der Hausschweine,” graded “good” by Frölich. This concern for the intertwined natural histories of humans and domesticated animals was also Darré’s main argument in his essay “The pig as a distinguishing feature for northern peoples and Semites.” And, as Gesine Gerhard has already noted, Darré apparently had no difficulty transferring the methods of animal breeding he had learned with Frölich to the breeding of humans, as may be concluded from his insistence on breeding a “new aristocracy from Blood and Soil” (the title of his most celebrated essay).[7] The animal breeder needed to establish the bloodlines of the different breeds that constituted the basic units of his work; the human breeder, Darré suggested, needed to produce in Germany a pure Nordic race in order to restore a true national community free from dangerous exotic elements.[8]
Darré’s first work after leaving Halle consisted in tracing the bloodlines of Hannoverian Horses, which he explicitly compared to the task of re-creating the ideal Nordic man. Historians thus are certainly not pushing analogies too far in suggesting that Darré’s blood-and-soil utopia and his program for breeding a new “rural aristocracy” out of the German peasantry owed much to his acquaintance with animal breeding. Darré’s proposal that breeding wardens (Zuchtwarte) screen the men and women who would live on the new hereditary landholdings (Hegehöfe) that would guarantee the re-creation of the Nordic race was not much different from the institutional arrangements that were imposing new standards on animal breeding in Germany. Reichsführer of the Schutzstaffel (SS) Heinrich Himmler, who had studied agriculture in the Technical University in Munich and who before Darré joined the party was the man responsible for Nazi agrarian ideology, recognized in Darré an indisputable authority in matters of heredity and made him chief of the Race and Settlement Office (Rasse- und Siedlungshauptamt, abbreviated RuSHA) in 1932.[9] Not only was Darré trusted with the task of selecting the families of brave Germans to settle in eastern European; he was also responsible for the selection of applicants to the SS and for permissions for SS members to marry. Who would have been more appropriate for the job of selecting the humans forming the SS clan than an expert in pig breeding?
As suggestive as these analogies between humans and pigs may be, we now know how little practical effect they had in cultivating an SS aristocracy. The approximately 20,000 marriage applications by SS members awaiting processing by May of 1937 justified Himmler’s decision to relax the time-consuming requirements of the procedure. In the previous year, Himmler had already suspended the demand that an SS applicant produce a family tree stretching back to 1800.[10] Compiling an SS clan book comparable to the animal studbooks and registers was never easy, even in such a controlled environment. Extending it to the whole German peasantry, as Darré dreamed of doing, proved even more difficult.[11] And later, when the RuSHA officials faced the challenge of screening millions of people in the occupied eastern Europe territories for German blood in order to build a Ethnic German List from which to settle the region, the arbitrariness of racial examination was obvious, the decisive element being the “immediate impression gained by the assessor at the examination.”[12] The Nazis’ murderous racial policies had a reach unknown to any other political regime, but their implementation was always messier than Nazis were ready to admit.[13]
Darré argued in “Das Schwein als Kriterium für nordische Völker und Semitten” that with no pigs there were no true Germans. The domestication of pigs, he suggested, was a crucial component of the process of forming a Northern race distinct from the Semitic ones. Raising pigs was taken as a constitutive element of being German. Racial distinctions were not only a matter of different biological origins but also a matter of different relations to the soil, such as those that pigs made possible. In Martin Heidegger’s conception of race, Germans, being “rooted in the soil,” were “able to create for themselves a native land, even in the wilderness,” whereas “the nomads… left numerous wastelands behind them that had been fertile and cultivated land when they arrived.”[14] As is suggested throughout this book, the biological organic nation was defined as much through food as through race. According to Darré, race was defined through practices of food production: Germans were separated from Jews by pigs.
The new nobility (Adel) promoted by Darré relied not only on identifying human blood lineages but also on the production of pigs and potatoes, attaching Germans to the soil. If, as the SS story reveals, there is good reason to doubt the effectiveness of the Nazi state in applying genetics to form a new racial national community, this book suggests that we should nevertheless pay close attention to the historical role of breeding plants and animals in the making of Nazi Germany.
Darré’s pig talk was not only about a mystical distant past of forests, acorns, and ancient Aryans. He was trying to address the very concrete experience of hunger familiar to the German population during World War I. In Der Schweinemord (1937), Darré offered a reinterpretation of the policies of drastically reducing the size of the German pig herd in the war years as a plot by Jewish academics to eliminate the German race.[15] The effort by the Ministry of Interior during the conflict to guarantee that the 25 million hogs held by German peasants would not compete with humans for potatoes and grain in a context of food rationing was described as a Jewish plot that contributed directly to the death by starvation of three quarters of a million Germans. According to Darré, Jewish experts in academic institutions and in government offices, who had poor statistics and poor knowledge of the actual conditions of husbandry, declared a “war on pigs” that reduced the size of the German herd by about 15 million. The surplus of potatoes not consumed by pigs in 1915 failed to reach the population as a result of a lack of central control over distribution, and many tons of potatoes rotted in poor storage conditions. With the above-mentioned late blight epidemics of the potato crop of 1917 and the increasing demand for potatoes to compensate for the lack of pork and lard, the situation turned disastrous.[16] Darré singled out Walther Rathenau, an industrialist who headed Germany’s department of economic management in 1914 and 1915, as the head of the plot. Darré accused Rathenau of being one of the Elders of Zion, and of intentionally depleting the food supplies of the Reich.[17]
5
Hermann Reichle,
6
Richard W. Darré, “Professor Frölich als Lehrer und Wissenschaftlicher,”
7
Gesine Gerhard, “Food as a weapon: Agricultural sciences and the building of a greater German Empire,”
12
Longerich,
13
On the Nazi racial policies, see Michael Burleigh and Wolfgang Wippermann,
14
Quoted from page 143 of Emmanuel Faye,