Fascist Pigs: Technoscientific Organisms and the History of Fascism

The mandatory performance tests to include pigs in the national register pertained only to fertility (Zuchtleistung) and not to the more demanding and time-consuming fattening performance tests (Mastleistung) developed in academia. The RNS thus also constituted an additional German pig performance register (Deutsche Schweineleistungsbuch), which included only those animals that had performed well enough on the standardized fattening tests developed by Jonas Schmidt, Gustav Frölich, and other academic breeders.[65] By February of 1938, only seven boars and 89 sows had made it to the German performance register. Two years later there were still no more than 35 boars and 320 sows in the performance register. In 1944 the total had increased to 791 sows and 87 boars, demonstrating that not even during the war did the RNS leave aside the task of identifying the elite animals that constituted the bloodlines expected to regenerate the entire German swine herd.

The obligation of commercializing only registered animals allowed academics to trace the bloodlines of the many thousands of breeding animals sold throughout the Reich.[66] For example, of the 5,323 boars auctioned in Westphalia from 1937 to 1939, it was possible to identify a single bloodline, the “Rabe-Radbod-Linie,” as responsible for at least half of the commercialized boars. And bloodlines involved much more than recording the animals’ progeny. As it was the case with the human pedigrees that had been used by physicians and eugenicists since the end of the nineteenth century, animal pedigrees were open to all sorts of relations in order “to capture the whole network of kin relationships” that surrounded an individual animal.[67] Müller-Wille and Rheinberger thought-provokingly suggested that such bi-dimensional charts resembled schematic drawings of electrical circuits more than the linear structures common in genealogy. Frölich emphatically asserted that “pedigree charts should not be schematic” but also should offer detailed information on the properties and performance of the different animals indicating its value for the breeder.[68] The charts were to be filled with the results coming out of the performance test centers directed by academics.

The merits of individual animals belonging to a bloodline were to be discussed in detail, bringing together old breeders’ talk of external properties and modern performance records. The new standards developed by academics actually increased the ability of breeders for individuating animals. The external properties identified with certain bloodlines that previously had earned prizes in fairs and shows and that raised the market value of animals, more than being replaced, were now complemented with the new vocabulary of performance records.[69] And in fact at least 26 of the 35 boars included in the performance register in 1940 had won major prizes at RNS shows.[70] Frölich himself embodied the compromise of the two worlds: he had judged animal shows since the 1910s, evaluating sows and boars for their bodily proportions, while at his institute he was developing performance standards for fertility and gain rates. More significantly, as we shall see, an important part of academic research in animal breeding in the Nazi years was to explore the relations between form and performance, promising to overcome the differences between commercial breeders’ visual evaluations and academic breeders’ tests.

^{Figure 4.6 The German pig performance register, 1940.}

^{(“Deutsches Schweineleistungsbuch,” Zeitschrift für Schweinezucht 47, no. 15, 1940: 117)}

Nutritional Freedom and Fats

The special issue of Kühn-Archiv was part of the 1938 jubilee celebration of the 75th anniversary of the Agricultural Institute of the University of Halle—an occasion to honor the Agricultural Institute’s service to the Nazi regime.[71] Gustav Frölich did not join the National Socialists until 1937, but his early connections with Richard Darré were hard to miss. Emil Woermann, the director of the Institute for Farm Management, took away any possible doubts about the direct involvement of the agricultural faculty of the University of Halle with Nazism. His election as rector in 1935 was based on the confidence the National Socialists had in him for having implemented the Gleichschaltung (the process by which the Nazis established a system of totalitarian control over German society). In the upcoming years he would be entrusted with the task of creating an agricultural production plan for Europe, confirming his status as one of the regime’s most trusted agriculture planners.[72]