If plant breeders relied on the pure line as their basic building unit, animal breeders were to work with bloodlines selected for their performance records. In the 1920s, it was thus common to find in the pages of the Zeitschrift für Schweinezucht (Journal of Swine Breeding) advertisements praising the virtues of the bloodlines of Edelschwein from Friedrichswert and emphasizing the value of fertility. But, as Frölich pointed out in 1927 in an article published on the page immediately following one such advertisement, to establish such bloodlines—to “think through generations,” as he put—it was necessary to have enough time and enough money to test a sufficiently significant number of animals under controlled conditions.[45] Even large animal-breeding operations, such as the Friedrichswert, had difficulty coping with such demands. In other words, performance records needed the collaboration from academia, making the case for the importance of university animal-breeding institutes for the success of commercial breeding. As cultural historians of heredity have rightly insisted, recording practices were decisive for the transformation of breeding into an academic subject.[46]
Systematic record keeping of the performance of swine in Germany began in eastern Prussia in 1924, promoted by commercial breeders’ associations following the example offered by their Swedish counterparts.[47] Every pig had one ear notched soon after birth, and the number of pigs in the litter was recorded. Also, litter weights were registered when the pigs reached four weeks of age as a proxy for sows’ productivity and their nursing ability. Breeders’ associations in Silesia and Pomerania soon followed the procedure and had technicians sent to their members’ households. Data gathered in the association’s files offered the possibility of comparing the performance of different breeds and establishing criteria for identifying the most promising bloodlines among the herds of its members.
Scientific research institutes began to play an important role in implementing performance records from the moment these records included measurements of weight gains from feed in addition to fertility statistics. As was noted above, after the traumatic World War I experience, the quantity and quality of feed needed for swine to reach market weight was no minor issue in deciding which animals were the most valuable. But it was hard to ask herd owners to keep painstaking daily records of weight gains under constant conditions. For these more demanding performance tests, known as fattening tests, pigs were moved to Mastleistungsprüfungsanstalten (pig fattening performance testing centers), where they were observed in a controlled environment. The first of these centers was founded in 1925 in Friedland (in Lower Saxony, the main region for breeding Veredelte Landschwein) in connection with the Animal Breeding Institute and Dairy at the University of Göttingen. In 1930 a second center (both for Edelschwein and for Veredelte Landschwein) was created for Saxony in the facilities of the University of Halle at the Lettin property. By 1939 there were fattening performance testing centers in every province of Germany. They were located at the main academic animal-breeding institutes, including the Versuchswirtschaft für Schweinehaltung, -füttterung, und -zucht at Ruhlsdorf, near Berlin; the Institut für Tierzüchtung der Preuss Versuchs- und Forschunganstalt Kraftborn, in Silesia; the Institut für Tierzucht- und Molkereiwesen der Universität Bonn in the Rhineland; the Anstalt für Tierzucht und Milschwirtschaft der Universität Jena, in Thuringia; and the Institut für Milcherzeugung der Preuss Versuchs- und Forschunganstalt Kiel, in Schleswig-Holstein.[48] The list illustrates the intertwinement of academic and commercial breeding operations.
The work of Jonas Schmidt, the pioneer of fattening testing in Germany and the head of the Göttingen Institute, is helpful for understanding the conflation of the academy and the practical world that the fattening performance tests brought about. In 1927–28 Schmidt tested 100 boars and 100 sows, all of them veredelte Landschwein, in his fattening performance testing center in Friedland.[49] Four pigs from each litter were taken as a sample at breeders’ farms and brought to Friedland when they reached 10 weeks of age. After two weeks of adaptation to the new environment, the test was begun by feeding the animals barley grist (Gerstenschrot) and 100 grams of fish flour per animal every day. After the first ten weeks of the test they were also given 200 grams of dry yeast. The test was finished when pigs reached a minimum weight of 100 kilograms. Carcass data—fat/meat proportion, weight of main butcher parts (bacon, lard, chops, ham, and so on), and percentage of wasted mass—were recorded after slaughter of three of the four littermates. After testing sufficient number of animals, it was possible to establish a standard of performance for veredelte Landschwein.
The aim was to identify the bloodlines with better fattening performance—those that made more with less—and to eliminate the ones that performed poorly. In subsequent years, Jonas Schmidt and the scientists working in Germany’s animal-breeding institutes would dedicate much of their work to establishing performance standards for the most important commercial breeds (veredelte Landschwein and Edelschwein) against which to measure the animals tested at the various centers. They hoped to offer commercial breeders clear criteria for evaluating their animals.
For the scientists the advantages of systematic testing were no less obvious: they now had access to data on a large number of animals tested under controlled conditions. The data in articles published in the 1930s and the 1940s in academic journals such as Züchtungskunde and Zeitschrift für Tierzüchtung und Zücthungsbiologie, which both had Jonas Schmidt as editor in chief, were from repeated testing at the pig fattening performance testing centers.[50] Academics such as Jonas Schmidt and Gustav Frölich thus contributed to making pigs into industrialized organisms bred according to standardized performance tests and, in the same single step, making them into manageable and measurable research objects. In other words, they extended the laboratory space to all of Germany’s commercial pig-breeding operations.[51]
Performance Tests and the Nazi Bureaucracy
The tight connections between scientists’ concerns and the Nazi food policies expressed in Richard Darré’s diatribes are not difficult to trace. The fattening performance tests developed at academic institutes offered standards with which to evaluate animals’ potential contribution to the building of the Nazi regime. In Darré’s words, “we need animals achieving the highest performance when fed exclusively with homeland feedstuff.”[52] Hogs bred according to the results of performance tests would guarantee the nation’s nutritional independence, materializing the “Blut und Boden” dictum.
But performance tests could have such large effects only if connected with an extended bureaucracy reaching the entire territory. In December of 1933, soon after the seizure of power by the Nazis, the Reichsnährstand took over the entire organization of German animal breeding, integrating in its structure the breeding societies scattered through the country.[53] All the local societies were now part of RNS-controlled associations of breeders of cattle, pigs, sheep, and small animals.
45
G. Frölich, “Die Zucht nach Blutlinien in der Schweinezucht,”
46
Thurtle,
47
Schmidt,
49
Jonas Schmidt and H. Vogel, “Leistungsprüfungen an veredelten Landschweinen auf dem Versuchsgut Friedland der Universität Göttingen,”
50
For works mentioning explicitly the advantages of counting with animals from the performance centers, see Richard Schneider, “Untersuchungen über äußere Form und Mastleistungseigenschaften beim deutschen Edelschwein,”
51
This process of extending the laboratory into the world outside echoes Bruno Latour’s much-quoted book
53
Albert Brummenbaum, “Die Organisation der deutschen Tierzucht,”