Particularly interesting here is how Carl Kronacher, the head of the Institute for Animal Breeding and Domesticated Animals Genetics of the University of Berlin, undertook a revision of his previous studies in pig genetics. Among the leading German academic animal breeders, Kronacher was by far the most interested in fundamental processes of inheritance.[95] In 1931 he had been able to secure for his institute new stables in Berlin-Dahlem for demonstration and research in domesticated animals genetics.[96] The pigs’ stable held about a hundred animals of different breeds and crosses, including Edelschwein, veredelte Landschwein, Schwäbisch-Haller, Berkshires, Cornwalls, and Hildesheimer Landschwein, mixing commercial German breeds with English ones and with the traditional German breeds. Now, most of Kronacher’s experiments dealt with probing the Mendelian behavior of “formal properties”—color inheritance patterns and body conformation.[97] The data taken concerning carcass were qualitative, such as firmness of pork and lard, and didn’t include protein/fat ratios. As Kronacher clearly stated in 1936, this was because “before 1933 [the year of the Nazi seizure of power] lard weight had no economic significance.”[98]
It was only after 1933 that fat came to be seen as a crucial contribution of pigs to the nutritional freedom of the Volk—a perception that was to be intensified by the 1936 Four-Year Plan, which demanded different experimental measurements. From Kronacher’s publications it is obvious the inflection in direction of the nature of research undertaken in the Berlin Institute. Besides fat, Kronacher also began to pay attention to performance tests, investigating the relations between breeding performance (fertility, milk, weights of sows and piglets) and fattening performance.[99] Whereas in the cases of Gustav Frölich and Jonas Schmidt one finds scientists enlarging the visions of the Nazi politicians Richard Darré and Herbert Backe, Kronacher’s story seems to point at a more traditional relation of scientists adapting their works to the political demands of the moment.
After Kronacher’s retirement in 1936, Jonas Schmidt took over his position in the Berlin Institute. It is no surprise that crossings of German commercial breeds with fat exotic races were undertaken with renewed interest. This was seen as a faster way to close the country’s fat gap than the route of inbreeding Edelschwein and veredelte Landschwein. Great effort was put into crossing Mangalica pigs of Yugoslavia origin with those two breeds, so as to combine the extreme high fat content of the first with the fast growing rates of the second.[100] In Berlin, Schmidt now had the important contribution for swine body measurements of Friedrich Hogreve, who (benefitting from funding from the Forschungsdienst, led by Konrad Meyer) had used x rays to follow the development of pigs during the fattening process. Hogreve’s technique was based on the simple fact that a animal’s leaner parts produce a greater attenuation of x rays than fatter ones. Visual methods not only avoided the need to sacrifice animals to take carcass measurements; they also had the obvious advantage of offering data at different development stages.[101] Hogreve’s program was to establish visual standards corresponding to different stages of fat formation for each breed at controlled feeding conditions. Normal values for each breed of fat thickness at different development stages would enable breeders to evaluate early on the possible contribution of an animal to increase fat content in any given mating.[102] Hogreve thus promised a crucial tool to accelerate crossing procedures in order to have fatter pigs serving the nutritional freedom of the German Volk.
Bodenständigkeit (Rootedness in the Soil)
Gustav Frölich summarizes for us the task of animal breeders serving the Nazi regime in his contribution to the ominous Festschrift published in 1939 by the German scientific community to celebrate Adolf Hitler’s fiftieth birthday:
The Battle for Production and the Four-Year Plan aim at achieving nutritional independence and eliminating the import of raw materials. For this objective are especially important the closing of the gap in fat supply, protein production, and the provisioning of textile fabrics. An increase in the number of domestic animals is a narrow answer to the challenge. Much more important is the increase of their performance through rooted in the soil (bodenständig) and food efficient races and types.[103]
The challenge was to increase fat and protein production through animals avoiding fodder imports from abroad. In fact, animal nutrition was no minor subject for academic breeders such as Frölich, Kronacher, Schmidt, and Zorn. They all experimented intensively with diet and breeds combinations, testing the nutritional values of domestic feeds and publishing recipes to be distributed among peasants by the RNS in the framework of the extensive propaganda effort of the Battle of production and the Four-Year Plan.[104] Frölich and his Halle colleague Luthge, for example, came out with a ration of two thirds of a pound of fishmeal, a tenth of a pound of soybean meal, and a third of a pound of rye per head per day, plus all the potatoes the pigs would eat.[105] The aims were clear. First there was the need of diverting grains, in which Germany was far from being self-sufficient, from animal feeding into human nutrition, a move made possible through the increased use in animal diets of potatoes as well as turnips and sugar beet, of which the country had plenty. After the sharp increase in the price of rye instituted by the RNS in 1935 to ensure grain supply for human consumption, pigs began to be fed overwhelmingly on potatoes.[106] Second, the importing of protein concentrates used in the early phases of pigs development—when a diet rich in tubers is not adequate—was rationed, which led not only to diminishing the amount of intake but also to a push for the use of ersatz feed produced from fish.[107] One of the important results coming out of the research group on animal breeding led by Jonas Schmidt, and put together for the Four-Year Plan by the Forschungsdienst, was the determination of a new protein minimum intake for pigs’ early development phases significantly lower than the one normally used by German pig herders.[108]
95
See Carl Kronacher,
96
Carl Kronacher, “Das Institut für Tierzüchtung und Haustiergenetik der Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität Berlin,”
97
See the summary of Kronacher’s experimental undertakings with pigs in C. Kronacher and A. Ogrizek, “Vererbungsversuche und -Beobachtungen an Schweinen”
99
C. Kronacher and R. Hundsdörfer, “Züchtungsbiologische Beobachtungen und die Ergebnisse fünfjähriger Leistungsprüfungen an der Schweineherde des Versuchs- und Forschungsgutes Koppehof,”
100
Jonas Schmidt, F. Hogreve, and R. Thomsen “Über Untersuchungen an ersten Kreuzungen aus jugoslawischen Mangalicas und deutschen Schweinerassen,”
101
Friedrich Hogreve, “Ausbau eines neuen Forschungsweges zur Bestimmung der Fettwüchigkeit und Fettleistung in vercshiedenen Mastabschnitten beim lebenden Schwein verschiedener Rassenzugehörigkeit,”
102
Friedrich Hogreve, “Untersuchungen über die Fettbildung wachsender Mastschweine mittels der Röntgendurchleuchtung,”
103
Gustav Frölich, “Tierzucht,” in
104
Helmut Körner and Georg Claus,
106
Shaw, “Potato fed swine”; Corni and Gies,
107
Jonas Schmidt and J. Kliesch, “Untersuchungen über die verwertung von Zellmehl bei der Schweinemast,”
108
Jonas Schmidt, “Arbeiten und Aufgaben der Reichsarbeitsgemeinschaft Tierzucht,” in