Fascist Pigs: Technoscientific Organisms and the History of Fascism

The Reischsnährstand, founded in September 1933, the first year of Nazi rule, was supposed to play a major role in freeing Germany from its dependence on imported food. According to Clifford Lovin’s still-apt characterization, the RNS was “designed to relieve the farmer of the uncertainties of a capitalist market economy so he could serve his nation better both as food producer and culture bearer.”[47] And the truth is that the setting up of this organization, taking over the numerous pre-existent associations and societies of agriculture in Germany, by establishing fixed prices and controlling production, marked the end of the free market for agriculture in the country.[48] This Food Estate was built as a “self-governing corporate body” that rejected the atomizing and destructive influences of democracy and liberalism and promoted the estates (Stände) as “the organizational form of the economic aspect of the life of each individual.”

To ensure that production developed as efficiently as was possible, the RNS extended its control and supervision to every farm in the country. In about 55,000 German villages an Ortsbauernführer was responsible for overseeing day-to-day activities. The Ortsbauernführer reported to 541 Kreisbauernführer, who in turn reported to one of the 19 Landesbauernführer. The local leaders were to execute the policies set at the RNS headquarters in Berlin, and Darré gave them authority to punish those who violated regulations.[49] Supervision was facilitated from 1936 on by the introduction of a record card for every holding larger than 5 hectares that required the occupier to provide exhaustive details. A copy was then held by the Kreisbauernführer. More than 2 million holdings, comprising about 90 percent of all agricultural land, were included in this new system.

And the structure wasn’t directed only at controlling farms; it also included credit cooperatives from which farmers obtained funds to buy their annual stock of seed and fertilizers, the cooperatives and merchants to whom the farmers delivered their produce, and the dairies, mills, and factories that processed food for consumption in the cities.[50] Vertical unions (Hauptvereinigungen) included every individual involved in the production, processing, or sale of one crop (grain, potatoes, sugar, cattle, milk, and so on). These unions regulated production quotas, set grading requirements, and could prevent the creation of new enterprises. The Food Estate reached an enrollment of about 17 million members, which made it the biggest of all the organizations of the Nazi regime. Historians’ common obsession with revealing the many flaws of the RNS has led to repeatedly underestimate its contribution in expanding the infrastructural power and the reach of the Nazi state.[51] It is not just that the RNS was quite successful in increasing production and reducing at the same time food imports, making German agriculture much more self-sufficient than it had been before the Nazis seized power. The point is more about missing the importance of the RNS in institutionalizing Nazism as a regime. It should be hard to dismiss the significance of an organization that exercised more or less direct control over more than 25 percent of Germany’s GDP and constituted the largest economic unit in the world.[52]

How, then, can we reconcile the portrayal of Darré as the radical conservative author of Das Bauerntum als Lebensquell der nordischen Rasse (1929) and Neuadel aus Blut und Boden (1930), two books that contributed to making his name on the extreme right and that would justify his position as one of the chief ideologues of the Nazi Party, with this gigantic bureaucratic arrangement aimed at bringing a new order to the German fields by standardizing farmers’ procedures? If historians insist in offering an image of Darré as no more than a Medieval nostalgic aching for an organic society built on estates (Stände), they should at least incorporate the qualifications introduced in 1940 by a sharp observer of the corporatist phenomenon in Nazi Germany: “There is little that is feudal and much that is anti-feudal in the method of creation, the internal life and the purposes of the 1940 streamlined Stände.”[53] Let us keep that suggestive formulation of the “streamlined Estate” in mind when we explore the relations between the RNS and the BRA—between the Nazi regime and science.