Fascist Pigs: Technoscientific Organisms and the History of Fascism

The close involvement of agricultural scientists with the regime was, of course, not an exclusive to the University of Halle, as was particularly obvious in the community of academic animal breeders. A few months after the publication of the 1936 law on animal breeding, Wilhelm Zorn, head of the Institut für Tierzüchtung der Preuss Versuchs- und Forschungsanstalt at Kraftborn in Silesia, in his role as chairman of the Deutschen Gesellschaft für Züchtungskunde (German Society for Breeding Knowledge), expressed his gratitude for the opportunity that had been given to academic breeders to show their value to the national community.[73] His speech was given on the occasion of the Animal Breeding Day of the Forschungsdienst (Research Service), which had been created jointly by the Ministry of Food and Agriculture and the Ministry of Science to direct agricultural research.[74] Zorn was especially grateful to the new regime for bringing together science and praxis, with the RNS rationalizing animal breeders’ practices following academics’ guidelines and the Forschungsdienst directly supporting scientific research in the different universities and institutes of the Reich.[75] And to guarantee the weaving of the two there was nothing better than making Jonas Schmidt head of the animal-breeding section of the Forsch­ungsdienst. Schmidt was the Göttingen professor and promoter of fattening performance tests who, together with Zorn, directed the German Society for Breeding Knowledge.

Although Schmidt was denied admission to the National Socialist party, allegedly for having been involved in freemasonry, he had no lack of Nazi credentials. He was a member of the SA-Reiterstandarte, of the Nationalsozialistische Volkswohlfahrt, of the NS-Dozenten, and of the NS-Alt-Herrenbund.[76] In 1933 he was quick to sign, along with his Göttingen colleagues, a letter demanding that the process of cleansing the university of Jewish professors be sped up. In subsequent years, with support from Konrad Meyer, who considered Schmidt one of his closest aides, he would become the Reich’s academic “pope” of animal breeding.[77] As important as these formal and informal political ties between scientists and the Nazi bureaucracy may have been, let us consider how actual scientific research was intertwined with the regime. Jonas Schmidt’s work is illuminating in that respect.

In 1935, building on the performance records he had amassed at the Friedland fattening test center, Schmidt presented the results of his experiments designed to explore relations between form and performance.[78] Through the performance test center, he had eventually accumulated enough data to be able to present statistically relevant results. The final aim was no less than to establish correlations between, on the one hand, fertility and fattening performances and, on the other, inheritable external features of the animals’ bodies. If such correlations were to be established, it would be possible to offer commercial breeders guidance on how to conduct selection and mating operations entirely on the basis of external visual observation of the animals. Schmidt’s research promised to overcome the fact that it would never be possible to subject a large majority of breeding animals to the painstaking fattening performance tests.

Schmidt and his team measured 619 veredelte Landschwein for height, chest width and depth, trunk length, forehead width, head length, and size of cannon bone, and crossed these data with performance results for fattening (duration of fattening, feed consumption) and carcass (weight of chops, bacon, and lard, and fat/meat ratio). The results were encouraging. Larger chest depths correlated well with shorter fattening times, higher gain rates from feeding, and smaller carcass waists.[79] In addition, carcass measurements showed that animals with deeper chests had higher fat content at the cost of less meat.[80]