A few months before the takeover by the RNS, the Zeitschrift für Schweinezucht (Journal of Pig Breeding) was already welcoming the new regime. In its account of the May 1933 exhibition of the Deutsche Landwirtschafts-Gesellschaft in Berlin, the journal not only reminded readers that two thirds of Germany’s meat intake was pork; it also emphasized the importance of bringing practical breeders and scientists together to increase the performance of the nation’s swine herd.[54] A picture of Gustav Frölich exchanging thoughts with a pig herder at the exhibition demonstrated explicitly the union of mind and hand. The reporter couldn’t contain his enthusiasm for the task awaiting German pig breeders in the years to come:
During [World War I] there was a denomination for people who didn’t earn the iron cross or other medals but who nevertheless demonstrated notable courage, purposeful energy, brotherly love, and sincere comradeship. They were called the front pigs (Frontschweine)…. Let us borrow this term into our field of action so that we may say that in the gigantic battle that has now started… for a vital Germany inhabited by loyal people, the German pig breeders will gladly be the front pigs![55]
To induce German pig breeders to become “front pigs” mobilized for the building of a national community, the RNS devised a new institutional arrangement in addition to the breeders’ societies. Each of the nineteen Landbauernschaften in the provincial structure of the RNS was provided with an office for animal breeding, an office for animal health, and a registry office (Köramt). The latter was responsible for publishing an annual list of the stallions, bulls, boars, and rams recorded in the provincial registers. This task was performed locally by register posts (Körstellen) operating in the 541 Landkreise (counties) and directly controlling the farmers’ management of their herds.[56] The stakes were high, since the holding of domesticated animals accounted for about 60 percent of the value of Germany’s agricultural output.[57]
But never mind all the talk about peasantry and smallholdings characteristic of Blut und Boden ideology.[58] The bureaucracy was not intended to deal with every German household involved in raising domestic animals. This was particularly obvious in the case of swine, which nearly every German country household kept. By 1937 about 5.3 million households reported pig rearing, of which only 3.5 million were commercial operations.[59] More important for my argument, out of a total of 24 million slaughtered pigs in that same year, there were about 32,000 registered breeding pigs, of which only 7,000 were boars. The aim was to raise the performance of all the swine in Germany by improving the performance of this breeding stock. The RNS directed its efforts to the owners of those 32,000 registered pigs (an elite army of Frontschweine, in RNS terminology) and ignored the vast number of Gebrauchtzüchter (subsistence breeders) who were not members of the breeders’ associations. The Frontschweine were only the pedigree breeders (Stammzüchter) who, in addition to their membership in the RNS associations, bred only one race in purity and kept detailed records of their herds including data on genealogy, feed intake, and diseases. To be considered a pedigree breeder, at least half of one’s boars had to be the result of inbreeding and their ancestry known for at least three generations.[60] Crucially, the status of pedigree breeder demanded performance tests of one’s herd, supervised by both the local breeders’ society and the local RNS structure.
Following the set of rules formulated by the RNS, no later than the fourth week after birth every piglet had to be earmarked by the pedigree breeder. The right ear had to show the register number of the mother and in the edge the piglet’s number; the piglet’s left ear was left free until the animal was included in the books kept by the RNS register office, after which it was marked with the register number and the register symbol.[61] For an animal to be considered to enter the register it had to include information of its male bloodline until the third generation up. Also, minimum performance records of the mother were demanded for a boar to have its name in the register. Only descendants of sows with a minimum of seven piglets in their first litters and whose fourth-week average weight in each litter reached at least 45 kilograms entered the register.
After the RNS took over of the German animal-breeding structure, the register books would become the basis for buying and selling breeding animals all over the Reich. More than that, the animal-breeding law (Tierzuchtgesetz) issued by the Führer in March 1936 as part of the Battle for Production specified that only stallions, bulls, boars, and rams included in the register could be marketed as breeding animals.[62] The opening words of the law were clear: “The Reichsminister for Food and Agriculture authorizes the measures to promote bodenständig animal breeding…. Only registered sires are to be used to cover dams… and only animals of designated races may be used for breeding.”
Two years later, Kühn-Archiv, the academic journal published by the Halle Agricultural Institute, invited contributions to a special issue organized by Gustav Frölich the Halle alumni who had a say in organizing and promoting animal breeding in Germany. The large majority of the 49 alumni who contributed were members of the RNS structure responsible for enacting the animal breeding law of 1936. The opening contribution was, of course, by the most distinguished of Frölich alumni, Richard Walther Darré, in his dual role as Reich Minister of Food and Agriculture and leader of the RNS.[63] Animal breeders, the law suggested, carried a great responsibility toward the German people. In Darré’s words, the raising of domestic animals was the economic backbone of Germany’s peasantry. Since according to Hitler’s dictum “the Third Reich will be a peasant Reich or it will pass like those of the Hohenzollern and the Hohenstaufen,” breeders were responsible for the survival of the Reich.[64] The Halle Institute’s task was to establish the performance standards guiding animal breeders to meet their responsibilities toward the German people.
The mandatory performance tests to include pigs in the national register pertained only to fertility (Zuchtleistung) and not to the more demanding and time-consuming fattening performance tests (Mastleistung) developed in academia. The RNS thus also constituted an additional German pig performance register (Deutsche Schweineleistungsbuch), which included only those animals that had performed well enough on the standardized fattening tests developed by Jonas Schmidt, Gustav Frölich, and other academic breeders.[65] By February of 1938, only seven boars and 89 sows had made it to the German performance register. Two years later there were still no more than 35 boars and 320 sows in the performance register. In 1944 the total had increased to 791 sows and 87 boars, demonstrating that not even during the war did the RNS leave aside the task of identifying the elite animals that constituted the bloodlines expected to regenerate the entire German swine herd.
The obligation of commercializing only registered animals allowed academics to trace the bloodlines of the many thousands of breeding animals sold throughout the Reich.[66] For example, of the 5,323 boars auctioned in Westphalia from 1937 to 1939, it was possible to identify a single bloodline, the “Rabe-Radbod-Linie,” as responsible for at least half of the commercialized boars. And bloodlines involved much more than recording the animals’ progeny. As it was the case with the human pedigrees that had been used by physicians and eugenicists since the end of the nineteenth century, animal pedigrees were open to all sorts of relations in order “to capture the whole network of kin relationships” that surrounded an individual animal.[67] Müller-Wille and Rheinberger thought-provokingly suggested that such bi-dimensional charts resembled schematic drawings of electrical circuits more than the linear structures common in genealogy. Frölich emphatically asserted that “pedigree charts should not be schematic” but also should offer detailed information on the properties and performance of the different animals indicating its value for the breeder.[68] The charts were to be filled with the results coming out of the performance test centers directed by academics.
The merits of individual animals belonging to a bloodline were to be discussed in detail, bringing together old breeders’ talk of external properties and modern performance records. The new standards developed by academics actually increased the ability of breeders for individuating animals. The external properties identified with certain bloodlines that previously had earned prizes in fairs and shows and that raised the market value of animals, more than being replaced, were now complemented with the new vocabulary of performance records.[69] And in fact at least 26 of the 35 boars included in the performance register in 1940 had won major prizes at RNS shows.[70] Frölich himself embodied the compromise of the two worlds: he had judged animal shows since the 1910s, evaluating sows and boars for their bodily proportions, while at his institute he was developing performance standards for fertility and gain rates. More significantly, as we shall see, an important part of academic research in animal breeding in the Nazi years was to explore the relations between form and performance, promising to overcome the differences between commercial breeders’ visual evaluations and academic breeders’ tests.
56
For a detailed account of the working of such offices and posts at the local level, see Rudolf Becker,
58
The contradictions between the RNS’s rhetoric the praising the importance of small explorations for the national community and its actual policies always favoring large intensive industrial operations is a much-explored topic in the history of Nazi agricultural policies. See Corni and Gies,
59
Fritz Haring, “Wege zur Leistungssteigerung in der deutschen Schweinehaltung,”
62
Heinrich Lüthge, “Das Reichstierzuchtgesetz,”
65
For a sow to enter the Schweineleistungsbuch (SL), besides undergoing the fertility tests and health requirements, two piglets from two of its litters had to be sent to a local performance testing center. Their performance had to register a rate gain of at least 630 g per day when growing from 40 to 100 kg. For a boar to be included in the SL, six of its female descendants had to be already in the SL or, alternatively, it had to father, by the same sow, a minimum of five litters from which sows entered the SL. See Lüthge, “Das Reichstierzuchtgesetz,” p. 16; Schmidt,
66
Hans-Joachim Bredow, “Die wichtigsten männlichen Blutlinien des veredelten Landschweines Deutschlands,”
67
Staffan Müller-Wille and Hans-Jörg Rheinberger,
68
Gustav Frölich, “Blutlinienzucht bei Schweinen,”
69
On the tensions between academic cattle breeders and commercial ones for the Dutch context, see Bert Theunissen, “Breeding for nobility or for production? Cultures of dairy cattle breeding in the Netherlands, 1945–1995,”