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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.

^{Figure 4.6 The German pig performance register, 1940.}

^{(“Deutsches Schweineleistungsbuch,” Zeitschrift für Schweinezucht 47, no. 15, 1940: 117)}

Nutritional Freedom and Fats

The special issue of Kühn-Archiv was part of the 1938 jubilee celebration of the 75th anniversary of the Agricultural Institute of the University of Halle—an occasion to honor the Agricultural Institute’s service to the Nazi regime.[71] Gustav Frölich did not join the National Socialists until 1937, but his early connections with Richard Darré were hard to miss. Emil Woermann, the director of the Institute for Farm Management, took away any possible doubts about the direct involvement of the agricultural faculty of the University of Halle with Nazism. His election as rector in 1935 was based on the confidence the National Socialists had in him for having implemented the Gleichschaltung (the process by which the Nazis established a system of totalitarian control over German society). In the upcoming years he would be entrusted with the task of creating an agricultural production plan for Europe, confirming his status as one of the regime’s most trusted agriculture planners.[72]

The close involvement of agricultural scientists with the regime was, of course, not an exclusive to the University of Halle, as was particularly obvious in the community of academic animal breeders. A few months after the publication of the 1936 law on animal breeding, Wilhelm Zorn, head of the Institut für Tierzüchtung der Preuss Versuchs- und Forschungsanstalt at Kraftborn in Silesia, in his role as chairman of the Deutschen Gesellschaft für Züchtungskunde (German Society for Breeding Knowledge), expressed his gratitude for the opportunity that had been given to academic breeders to show their value to the national community.[73] His speech was given on the occasion of the Animal Breeding Day of the Forschungsdienst (Research Service), which had been created jointly by the Ministry of Food and Agriculture and the Ministry of Science to direct agricultural research.[74] Zorn was especially grateful to the new regime for bringing together science and praxis, with the RNS rationalizing animal breeders’ practices following academics’ guidelines and the Forschungsdienst directly supporting scientific research in the different universities and institutes of the Reich.[75] And to guarantee the weaving of the two there was nothing better than making Jonas Schmidt head of the animal-breeding section of the Forschungsdienst. Schmidt was the Göttingen professor and promoter of fattening performance tests who, together with Zorn, directed the German Society for Breeding Knowledge.

Although Schmidt was denied admission to the National Socialist party, allegedly for having been involved in freemasonry, he had no lack of Nazi credentials. He was a member of the SA-Reiterstandarte, of the Nationalsozialistische Volkswohlfahrt, of the NS-Dozenten, and of the NS-Alt-Herrenbund.[76] In 1933 he was quick to sign, along with his Göttingen colleagues, a letter demanding that the process of cleansing the university of Jewish professors be sped up. In subsequent years, with support from Konrad Meyer, who considered Schmidt one of his closest aides, he would become the Reich’s academic “pope” of animal breeding.[77] As important as these formal and informal political ties between scientists and the Nazi bureaucracy may have been, let us consider how actual scientific research was intertwined with the regime. Jonas Schmidt’s work is illuminating in that respect.

In 1935, building on the performance records he had amassed at the Friedland fattening test center, Schmidt presented the results of his experiments designed to explore relations between form and performance.[78] Through the performance test center, he had eventually accumulated enough data to be able to present statistically relevant results. The final aim was no less than to establish correlations between, on the one hand, fertility and fattening performances and, on the other, inheritable external features of the animals’ bodies. If such correlations were to be established, it would be possible to offer commercial breeders guidance on how to conduct selection and mating operations entirely on the basis of external visual observation of the animals. Schmidt’s research promised to overcome the fact that it would never be possible to subject a large majority of breeding animals to the painstaking fattening performance tests.

Schmidt and his team measured 619 veredelte Landschwein for height, chest width and depth, trunk length, forehead width, head length, and size of cannon bone, and crossed these data with performance results for fattening (duration of fattening, feed consumption) and carcass (weight of chops, bacon, and lard, and fat/meat ratio). The results were encouraging. Larger chest depths correlated well with shorter fattening times, higher gain rates from feeding, and smaller carcass waists.[79] In addition, carcass measurements showed that animals with deeper chests had higher fat content at the cost of less meat.[80]