And scientists and breeders were not the only actors involved. An important part of the effort of the RNS in the Battle of Production was to promote the use of tubers in pigs’ diets, making them more rooted in the soil. The pages of the Zeitschrift für Schweinezucht, the journal of the RNS-controlled association of swine breeders, publicized all sorts of steaming equipment that could simultaneously be used in the household and in the cooking of potatoes for swine feeding, given the fact that raw potatoes are not proper feed for animals. Also, the RNS pushed through the near-universal adoption of the storage of cooked potatoes at every peasant holding so as to guarantee that there would be enough feed for animals during the winter months. The standard RNS model for small households was a pit silo built by digging a four-foot-deep trench, covering its walls with flat sheet iron surrounded by straw and supported by six-foot-long posts sunk obliquely into the ground. After two to four weeks of storage, steamed potatoes were ready to be fed to pigs. Large farms instead made use of driers producing potato flakes, which had a slightly higher nutritional value. To increase the rootedness in the soil of German swine, housewives were mobilized to use all the leftovers from their kitchens to fatten them. By 1936 the RNS had distributed about 18 million “Fight the waste” postcards for women to use in their private correspondence.
According to the numbers published by agricultural statisticians, swine were evolving in the desired direction.[109] In the years 1934–1936 there were more swine than in 1930–1932, but the number of breeding animals had declined by 140,000. The number of piglets also had declined, to fewer than 1.6 million. Swine were living longer, and their total weight had increased from 2.85 million tons to 3.05 million. While breeding pigs were now living 2¼ years, fattening pigs were slaughtered at the age of 8–9 months. Crucially, fattening performance had improved, for swine consumed less grain (14 percent) at the same time they increased their pork and fat output. For the same period, the total fat output from swine had increased by 101,000 tons.
The changing geography of pig production also reflected the changing nature of pigs during the Nazi years. Northwest Germany’s location near an easy import market had made it one of the highest-producing regions of the country before the Nazi takeover. The regions around Bremen or Hamburg had easy access to imported grains and protein fodders, and made use of rations very different from the ones as proposed by Frölich, rising their animals almost exclusively on grains and fish and meat meals. As the Nazi regime increased restrictions on imports, particularly after the launching of the Four-Year Plan, pig production tended to increase in the eastern regions of the Reich (the regions with higher potato production) at the expense of the northwest.[110] Pigs raised in the east were more easily rooted in the soil than those of the northwest.
In 1937, three professors from the University of Halle—Gustav Frölich, Theodor Römer, and Emil Woermann—presented to the Kaiser Wilhelm Society a project for a new institute dedicated first and foremost to the nutrition of animals, including all major domesticated animals.[111] This was to become the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Animal Breeding, which was to be inaugurated in 1939. To confirm the importance of the subject for the Nazi economy, suffice it to say that by 1944 this institute had the second-largest budget of all institutes of the Kaiser Wilhelm Society, second only to the plant-breeding institute.
Following the research lines already mentioned above, the new institute was to work with animal performance tests, exploring the inheritance of performance characteristics. The results of this research were then to be distributed among the extended animal-breeding network of the RNS, guaranteeing “the highest performing stocks were selected in the most important German breeds for all types of livestock.” Agriculture State Secretary Herbert Backe, the first patron of the institute among the Nazi ruling elite, bluntly asserted that “all animals that make inefficient use of feed must be eliminated.”[112] In other words, all those animals not complying with the standard of rootedness in the soil established by academic animal breeders were to be slaughtered.
Other historians have already described in detail the forming and functioning of this institution.[113] Here I just want to make a brief commentary related to the buildings and location of the flamboyant new institute. The Kaiser Wilhelm Society had at its disposal a vast holding of about 800 hectares in Dummerstorf, near Rostock in the province of Mecklenburg. Those familiar with the works of Günter Grass can easily imagine of a landscape where the most distinctive feature are endless potato fields. The architects of the Kaiser Wilhelm Society adapted a previous farm as a scientific institution, preserving the original central building, from which radiated the many different departments with their laboratories of morphology, physiology, biological chemistry, genetics, and veterinary medicine. The institute was planned as a central research institution for the whole of German breeding and would become the largest such facility in all of Europe, with residential buildings, a school, a swimming pool, a community building with social facilities, farm buildings, and, of course, many stables. Green areas surrounded all the facilities. Every residential house had a private garden. Streets and squares were lined by dense rows of trees. It was a model community rooted in Mecklenburg’s soil. The architects spoke of it as harmoniously integrated in the region, as bodenständig, with no “alien elements disturbing the landscape of Mecklenburg.”[114]
So here we have a scientific institution whose very architecture is rooted in the soil. Science, which allegedly is responsible for objectifying the world, for detaching things from their local contexts, supposedly should have worked in the opposite direction instead of being attached to the land.[115] And again, as in the Portuguese case, architecture doesn’t make the main argument. The interesting point is that the standardized forms of life being produced by the works undertaken at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Animal Breeding were not only themselves rooted in the German soil; they were also produced to root Germans into the national soil. Only the new fat pigs, making efficient use of national fodders, sustained the community of Blut und Boden announced by Darré and guaranteed the nutritional freedom of the German Volk as articulated by Backe.
Fascist Pigs
Scientists had been developing animal performance tests before Nazis came to power. One could thus suggest that these were no more than tools that the Nazis would use in subsequent years to achieve their goals for food policy. Such an interpretation doesn’t account for the fact that these goals, as expressed by Darré, were also defined by academics in the aftermath of the traumatic hunger that affected Germans during World War I. The political Nazi imagination was already being molded by Frölich and by other scientists who were tinkering with the possibilities of producing animals less dependent on foreign imports. Autarky only made sense with performance tests proving animals could thrive on the national soil. Pigs responding well to the performance tests thus may be seen as carrying with them the 1914–1918 experience. They were veteran pigs, and thus German pig breeders called themselves Frontschwein.
109
Otto Brock, “Wo steht unsere deutsche Schweinezucht und Schweinemast?,”
111
See Susanne Heim,
112
“Der hohe Schweinebestand sichert die Fleischversorgung und ist in anpassung an die Futterlage auf der volkswirtschaftlich richtigen Höhe zu halten,”