Fascist Pigs: Technoscientific Organisms and the History of Fascism

After the Nazis seized power, the seed market, like everything else related to agriculture, would be centrally regulated. A meeting held in December 1933 between RNS officials and BRA scientists was to clarify the respective tasks considering plant protection, the first assuming all responsibilities in economic issues and the latter exclusively scientific ones.[54] In practical terms this meant the transfer of control of the regional network of local Plant Protection Offices from the BRA to the RNS. Such change was also a reaction to repeated criticisms concerning BRA activities by Erwin Baur, a major German geneticist and the first director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institut für Züchtungsforschung (Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Plant Breeding), who urged the BRA to make a choice between being a bureaucratic office and being a research institute. Baur argued that the BRA couldn’t have it both ways.[55] Baur had it wrong, for that was just what happened.

Eduard Riehm—the director of the BRA from Otto Appel’s retirement in 1933 till 1945, whose administration thus coincided with the life span of the Nazi regime—reacted to the reproach by invoking Baur’s privileged connections to H. Dietrich, former agriculture minister of the Reich from 1928 to 1930 and member of the left-leaning German Democratic Party (Deutsche Demokratische Partei). Riehm called Baur a “badischen Demokrat” and promised to align the BRA with the new order, well in tune with his membership in the NSDAP.[56] And in truth the idealized neat separation between bureaucratic and scientific spheres in plant protection during the Nazi years was, as we shall see, meaningless. Riehm, in 1936, was the first to assert the major role of his institution at the service of the Battle of Production.[57]

The Seed Decree of March 1934 confirms the importance of seed circulation for the streamlined RNS. The creation of a standardized certifying system and the prevention of selling uncertified seed, overseen by local branches of the RNS, contributed to the varietal cleansing of the market that allegedly was leading to the steep increases in yield demanded by the Battle for Production. In the apparent strict division of economic and scientific tasks between the RNS and the BRA, this regulation of the seed market clearly fell under the jurisdiction of the RNS. Nevertheless, what happened was that the previous Varietal Registry Commission of the BRA in Berlin-Dahlem was simply renamed the Office for Varietal Registration (Sortenregisterstelle) of the RNS, keeping its incumbency of producing the List of Approved Varieties now to be enforced by RNS officers.[58] In addition, these RNS officers were also trained at the BRA in short courses on seed certification.[59] Instead of just spreading the list among the members of the DLG, as had been done before the Nazis seized power, the list was now distributed through the extended network of the RNS.[60] More important, this was not just a service for better informing peasants about the best breeds. RNS officials used it instead to confirm which breeds could be cultivated in the national soil and which breeds could not. Apparently there was no resistance to having part of the RNS bureaucratic structure inside the BRA.

We now have a clearer picture of the entanglements between the work undertaken at the BRA and the institutionalization of the RNS. The control by the latter of the German seed circuit was built on standards developed in the laboratories of the first. Without the sprout test developed by BRA researchers in connection with the research on wart disease, there would have been no biological basis for the RNS’s varietal list. The RNS could undertake seed cleansing as an important part of its Battle for Production thanks to the sprout tests conducted by the BRA.