At the Preuss Versuchs- und Forschunganstalt für Tierzucht (Prussian Experiment and Research Institute for Animal Breeding) in Kraftborn, Silesia, under the direction of Wilhelm Zorn, similar experiments were undertaken for Edelschwein.[81] Following Schmidt’s example, data on the performance of 288 Edelschwein were crossed with body measurements to confirm Zorn’s findings for a different breed. As at Göttingen, the data originated from the tests undertaken by the fattening performance test center attached to the Breslau research institute in the years 1936–1938. The results, in contrast to Schmidt’s, were disappointing. No significant correlation was found between chest depth and performance, and only very small correlations were established between chest dimensions and rate of gain and meat/fat ratio. For the latter, the coefficients were so small they had no practical consequence. To compensate, it was found that larger trunk lengths corresponded to growing bacon thickness, indicating that lengthier animals had higher fat/meat ratios. Also, animals with higher daily gain rates from feed were found to have higher fat content. As we shall see, these points about fat content, which had already been highlighted by Schmidt’s experiments, would soon reveal their importance.
The consequences of the work of Zorn’s team in Kraftborn were obvious. There was no easy path from animals’ external features to their performance, nor was there any significant relationship between practical breeders’ visual evaluations and better-performing swine. Breeding decisions had to keep relying on the long and laborious tests undertaken at performance test centers and on records of bloodlines. Academic animal breeders had no quick way to change Germany’s animal production on a grand scale. The painstaking work associated with registers and performance tests promised results only in the long run.
That limitation didn’t have to be perceived as problematic; indeed, it reinforced the case for the elaborate bureaucratic infrastructure mounted by the RNS that led to the animal-breeding law of 1936. The performance records and standardized tests established by academic breeders were important in the process of integrating animal production in the complex of the RNS and thus enlarging the penetration capacity of Darré’s mammoth institution in Germany’s countryside. But clearly, from 1936 on, the efforts of the Nazi regime were not limited to expanding the state infrastructure to reach larger portions of the population. The Four-Year Plan memorandum drafted by Hitler in the summer of 1936 demanded that both the German army and the German economy be prepared for war within four years. Attached to the plan came a 50 percent reduction in the country’s trade deficit.[82] Although the issues of self-sufficiency in raw materials, energy, and food had been present since the beginning of the Nazi regime, they now assumed unprecedented urgency.
The efforts involved in the production of steel, synthetic rubber, and fuels were enormous. But we shouldn’t underestimate the nutrition obsessions, widespread among the Nazi elite and the German military commanders, that resulted from the consensus that World War I had been lost for lack of food supplies. The presence of Herbert Backe as food commissioner in the restricted team of the Four-Year Plan led by Hermann Göring was a clear sign that agriculture would keep its significance in the new phase of the regime. In subsequent years, Backe, who was Darré’s number two in the Ministry of Agriculture, would assume growing responsibilities, surpassing Darré as the most powerful man in the Nazi food bureaucracy. Backe, together with Konrad Meyer, would make sure that both plant and animal academic breeders would rise to the challenges posed by the Four-Year Plan.[83]
Pigs’ privileged status as objects of research was confirmed by the forming of a study group led by Wilhelm Zorn dedicated to increase fat and meat production in swine in the framework of Meyer’s Forschungdienst.[84] After all, according to the estimates of the statisticians from the Institute of Conjuncture Research (Institut für Konjunkturforschung),[85] pork accounted for about two thirds of Germans’ meat consumption, and bacon and lard for 30 percent of their intake of fat.[86] Now, if it was possible to think that most of the country’s needs in carbohydrates and proteins could be covered by domestic sources, by 1936 Germany was still importing 60 percent of the fats it consumed. The figure was particularly worrisome in a context of world markets closed to the Reich and of increasing difficulties of acquiring vegetable and marine oils. It is, thus, not surprising that, together with a large mobilization to increase butter production from German dairies, pigs were seen by the Four-Year Plan bureaucracy as the other available domestic source to close the gap in fats.[87] More fat from bacon and lard would also lessen the burden put on dairy production, which demanded the importing of expensive feeds such as oilcake.[88]
It is thus easy to understand the enthusiasm with the results of the experiments by Jonas Schmidt and Wilhelm Zorn that, by crossing pig body measurements and performance tests, promised clear visual rules for commercial breeders to select hogs (both Edelschwein and veredelte Landschwein) with higher fat ratios. Lengthy trunks and deep chests would help to close the national fat gap and get the country ready for war. If performance tests aimed at guaranteeing that only pigs making more out of produce of Germany’s soil were being reproduced, increasing pigs’ fat content was to root Germans in the national soil by increasing their domestic fat intake.
Zorn bluntly stated in the report of the Research Service of the Ministry of Agriculture for the years 1938–1941 that animal-breeding research was to deliver in a short time the solution for improving fat production of swine, thus decisively contributing for the nutritional independence of the Reich.[89] At a moment when there was a consensus among breeders in England and in the United States that they should develop leaner animals to stay profitable because of growing competition from fats of plant origin, betting on pigs as a source of protein, German breeders were taking the opposite path. According to the results obtained by Zorn’s and Schmidt’s teams, it was now possible to make sound selection decisions in Edelschwein and veredelte Landschwein for animals with higher fat content on the basis of external characteristics such as trunk and chest dimensions.
And selections in bloodlines of these two breeds were not the only path. No one advocated a return to the old fat German breeds to close the fats gap, since those breeds not only demanded very large periods of fattening but also consumed large amounts of feed. Such an option would have jeopardized both the effort to improve efficiency in feeding and the effort to increase pork production. There was no intention of giving away the precocity and the meat production of the modern German breeds. The other solution was therefore to cross veredelte Landschwein and Edelschwein with breeds of higher fat content, trying to keep the good properties of the first.[90] The idea was not to produce hybrid breeding animals; it was to have the first generation of hybrid swine used exclusively for fattening, not for reproduction. In this so-called Gebrauchskreuzungen (crossing for use), one took advantage of first-generation hybrid vigor and of the dominant character of the most interesting physiological properties such as strong gain from feed or fast fattening rate.[91]
Jonas Schmidt and his aides at Göttingen had been registering performance results of such first-generation crossings since 1926.[92] Particularly promising were the combinations of Edelschwein with the “old breed” hannoverschbraunschweigisches Landschwein in producing animals with both high contents of pork and lard and reasonable gains from feed performances.[93] The problem in subsequent years would be to enlarge both the number of different breeds and the number of animals involved in the experiment.[94] In spite of the limitations, the results were significant enough to be used in other institutions to align research with the priorities dictated by the Nutritional Freedom (Ernährungsfreiheit) motto of the Four-Year Plan.
81
On the history of this institution, see Wilhelm Zorn,
82
Tooze,
83
On Backe, see Gesine Gerhard, “Food and Genocide: Agrarian Politics in the Occupied Territories of the Soviet Union,”
84
The other main domestic animal occupying academic animal breeders was, of course, cattle.
85
On the importance of the statistics produced by this institute for the building of the Nazi regime, see J. Adam Tooze,
86
Hans von der Decken, “Die deutsche Futterbilanz mit Rücksicht auf die Versorgung mit Schweinefleisch und –fett,”
87
By 1943, German dairies were the source of 60% of the butter consumed in the Reich, up from 30% in 1939. See Joachim Lehmann, “Agrarpolitik und Landwirtschaft in Deutschland, 1939 bis 1945,” in
88
Since the 1920s, imports of oilseeds (soya and peanuts) had become crucial for German dairies. In 1928 and 1929 oilseed imports ran at more than 850 million Reichsmark per annum. Between 1932 and 1936, through the efforts of the RNS and Battle of Production, the import of oilcake was cut from 2.3 million tons to less than 1.1 million tons. See Tooze,
89
Wilhelm Zorn, “Steigerung der Fett- und Fleischerzeugung beim Schwein auf dem Weg der Züchtung,” in
90
F. Haring, “Für und wider die Kreuzungszucht,”
91
Schmidt,
92
D. Dschaparidse, “Beitrag zur Vererbung beim Schwein in der ersten Kreuzung,”
93
Jonas Schmidt, E. Lauprecht, and H. Forthoff, “Über die Vererbung des Körperbaus beim Schwein,”
94
Carl Kronacher und J. Kliesch, “Wie weit ist eine vermehrte Schweinefetterzeugung auf dem Wege der Gebrauchtskreuzung möglich?”