Fascist Pigs: Technoscientific Organisms and the History of Fascism

Under the “Imperial Decree of 26 December 1905 Pertaining to the Sequestration of Property of Natives in the Protectorate of South West Africa,” the whole territory of Hereroland (central South West Africa) and later the whole of Namaland (southern South West Africa) passed to the possession of German colonial rulers.[65] General von Trotha’s brutal repression of the Herero and Nama rebellion paved the way for settlement of the territory by brave German pioneers. Analogous to the promise made to SS members of idyllic farms in the open spaces of eastern Europe after the victory over the Bolsheviks, a huge portion of the new settlers of South West Africa came from the military after the demobilization that followed the victory over indigenous rebellions. Military personnel were allotted 5,000 hectares per person (an area that would more than double in subsequent years) at the price of 30 pfennigs per hectare.[66] By 1913, one seventh of the land marked for white ownership had been settled by 1,042 farmers. Germany would lose the colony during World War I, but the settlement pattern would endure until late in the twentieth century.[67]

The historical experience in South West Africa offers us a good hint of how German colonial rule would have looked in an eastern Europe settled by armed veterans of the SS. The natives who survived von Trotha’s brutal repression were confined to locations with no more than ten families each, their movements strictly controlled through a restrictive system of pass laws. Forbidden to own land, breed cattle, or raise horses, they had no means of survival other than forced labor for the colonizers.[68] Labor legislation not only criminalized desertion from employment; it also empowered employers to use physical punishment when they saw fit.

The infamous motto “Arbeit macht Frei” also informed a civilizing mission that claimed to be liberating the natives from their savage condition of nomad shepherds and taught them the virtues of hard labor in settled communities. In 1900 the missionary Peter Heinrich Brincker had described the Herero as “a nation submerged in the dirt of cattle, a nation which only lived for its cattle, whose entire thought and will blossomed only for its cattle.”[69] The nomadic Herero apparently were unable to settle the land, always moving from place to place to satisfy the needs of their cattle. They were seen as mere passive servants of their beasts. Never mind that the Herero were actually not nomadic and that they had stable settlements. Civilization was to be advanced by converting open pastureland into farms demarcated by barbed wire and settled by German colonizers. Active German settlers were contrasted with passive Herero, dominating the land to make it sustain virtuous communities of “rooted in the soil” farmers, living from the soil instead of being submerged in the dirt.[70]

^{Figure 6.7 German settlers’ Karakul farms in South West Africa (present-day Namibia). (Frölich and Hornitschek, Das Karakulschaf und seine Zucht, pp. 28–29)}

Paradoxically, in spite of all this racist vocabulary concerning animals and human social habits, and in a pattern common to many other colonial situations, settlers performed a mimicry of indigenous practices: Germans were to live in service of their animals as much as the Herero did.[71] While in the northeastern regions of the territory German settlers would become cattle ranchers, in the dryer southwest Karakul sheep were to be the structuring element of white settler sociability.[72] In the interwar years, already under the administration of the Union of South Africa and with a new influx of white settlers of Afrikaner origin, Karakul pelts would become the cornerstone of the territory’s economy and South West Africa would rise to the rank of major world producer of Persian furs second only to the Soviet Union. In 1946 Karakul pelts were responsible for at least four-fifths of overseas exports, overtaking diamonds, the second source of the territory’s income.[73] From 1,165 pureblood and 21,533 crossbred Karakul in 1913, South West Africa progressed to almost 2 million Karakul in 1937, of which 25,000 were pureblood.[74] German settlers were eager to reproduce small pieces of Germany in their farmhouses, typically trying to reproduce German manners in the desert. Depictions of Germans in South West Africa showed how Karakul had produced a colonial sociability as based on animals as the one Germans had exterminated.[75]