Fascist Pigs: Technoscientific Organisms and the History of Fascism

The Nazis insisted on food independence (Nahrungsfreiheit) as a necessary condition for both the biological survival of the race and its political independence.[4] The motto “Blut und Boden” (“Blood and soil”) asserted that peasants rooted in the soil constituted the “blood source of the German people.” Because potatoes were among the few staples that the German soil produced in sufficient quantities, they became important to the rootedness of the national community envisaged by the Nazis. Potatoes made up roughly 12 percent of an average German diet, and consumption of them had to increase if the Volk wished to become independent of foreign food sources. Nazi propaganda produced by Darré’s bureaucracy urged housewives to include potatoes in every possible recipe, making it clear that Germans were “children of the potato.”[5]

And potatoes didn’t only feed humans. Pigs consumed more than half of the potatoes produced in Germany. A significant increase in productivity in potato cultivation also meant diminishing imports of animal feed, the main source of concern for those aiming at sustaining Germans on produce from the national soil. To win the Battle for Production, the nutritional basis of both pig farming and dairy farming had to be radically changed toward domestically produced feeds, thus placing higher demands on Germany’s potato crop.

^{Figure 3.1 Peasant leaders (Bauernführer) from all regions of Germany parading through the streets of Berlin.}

^{(Achim Thiele and Kurt Goeltzer, Deutsche Arbeit im Vierjahresplan, Gerhard Stalling, 1933)}

One didn’t have to be a knowledgeable reader of the Reich’s trade statistics to understand what was at stake. Historians of fascism have rightly put great emphasis on comradeship forged in the trenches during World War I when explaining the rise of violent paramilitary movements. In earlier chapters, I did just that in exploring the military connotations of the Ardito breed of wheat and the connections of the Portuguese Wheat Campaign with the experience in the trenches of Linhares de Lima and Pequito Rebelo. But it is good to emphasize that it was also the war that made all the peasant talk of Nazi leaders, such as Hitler’s assertion that “the future of the nation… depends exclusively on the conservation of the peasant,” sound plausible. In the 1930s the vast majority of German adults had had acute personal experiences of hunger.[6] The British and French blockade during the 1914–1918 conflict and its malnutrition effects were blamed for killing about 600,000 Germans and Austrians and were thought to have caused social turmoil and to have hastened the surrender of the Second Reich.[7] In the war’s aftermath, the Nazis repeated ad nauseam the assertion that internal betrayal by Bolsheviks and Jews had led to the defeat by the German Army—in Hitler’s words, “the biggest treachery of the century.”[8] As the economic historian Adam Tooze asserts in his important revaluation of the role of agriculture in the Nazi regime, “World War I had forced the question of food supply back onto the agenda of European politics.”[9]

^{Figure 3.2 A bread line during World War I.}

^{(Bundesarchiv, Bild 183-R00012 / CC-BY-SA 3.0)}

In connecting food issues to Germany’s defeat in World War I, potatoes played no minor role. Already in the early stages of the war wheat flour was supplemented with potato additives and rye grain to bake the infamous grayish K-bread, the K standing for both ‘Krieg’ (war) and ‘Kartoffel’ (potato).[10] Nonetheless, the catastrophic outbreak of late blight in 1916 on the potato crop would cause K-bread shortages, and the winter of 1917 came to be recalled in Germany’s collective memory as the “turnip winter.”[11] Street riots, strikes, and harsh criticism of the government became common among consumers in Germany’s main cities, allegedly leading to the internal dissent denounced by the Nazis.[12] Potato pests were described as another foreign enemy, demanding the mobilization of populations to fight their presence with heavy use of chemical pesticides.[13] Several authors have highlighted the metaphorical importance of keeping the Fatherland clean from pests and epidemics for the subsequent racial policies of the Nazi state and the dynamics of genocide.[14] The method of this book is instead to keep following the track of plants and animals, avoiding fast transitions from non-humans to humans.