Fascist Pigs: Technoscientific Organisms and the History of Fascism

At the Preuss Versuchs- und Forschunganstalt für Tierzucht (Prussian Experiment and Research Institute for Animal Breeding) in Kraftborn, Silesia, under the direction of Wilhelm Zorn, similar experiments were undertaken for Edelschwein.[81] Following Schmidt’s example, data on the performance of 288 Edelschwein were crossed with body measurements to confirm Zorn’s findings for a different breed. As at Göttingen, the data originated from the tests undertaken by the fattening performance test center attached to the Breslau research institute in the years 1936–1938. The results, in contrast to Schmidt’s, were disappointing. No significant correlation was found between chest depth and performance, and only very small correlations were established between chest dimensions and rate of gain and meat/fat ratio. For the latter, the coefficients were so small they had no practical consequence. To compensate, it was found that larger trunk lengths corresponded to growing bacon thickness, indicating that lengthier animals had higher fat/meat ratios. Also, animals with higher daily gain rates from feed were found to have higher fat content. As we shall see, these points about fat content, which had already been highlighted by Schmidt’s experiments, would soon reveal their importance.

The consequences of the work of Zorn’s team in Kraftborn were obvious. There was no easy path from animals’ external features to their performance, nor was there any significant relationship between practical breeders’ visual evaluations and better-performing swine. Breeding decisions had to keep relying on the long and laborious tests undertaken at performance test centers and on records of bloodlines. Academic animal breeders had no quick way to change Germany’s animal production on a grand scale. The painstaking work associated with registers and performance tests promised results only in the long run.

That limitation didn’t have to be perceived as problematic; indeed, it reinforced the case for the elaborate bureaucratic infrastructure mounted by the RNS that led to the animal-breeding law of 1936. The performance records and standardized tests established by academic breeders were important in the process of integrating animal production in the complex of the RNS and thus enlarging the penetration capacity of Darré’s mammoth institution in Germany’s countryside. But clearly, from 1936 on, the efforts of the Nazi regime were not limited to expanding the state infrastructure to reach larger portions of the population. The Four-Year Plan memorandum drafted by Hitler in the summer of 1936 demanded that both the German army and the German economy be prepared for war within four years. Attached to the plan came a 50 percent reduction in the country’s trade deficit.[82] Although the issues of self-sufficiency in raw materials, energy, and food had been present since the beginning of the Nazi regime, they now assumed unprecedented urgency.

The efforts involved in the production of steel, synthetic rubber, and fuels were enormous. But we shouldn’t underestimate the nutrition obsessions, widespread among the Nazi elite and the German military commanders, that resulted from the consensus that World War I had been lost for lack of food supplies. The presence of Herbert Backe as food commissioner in the restricted team of the Four-Year Plan led by Hermann Göring was a clear sign that agriculture would keep its significance in the new phase of the regime. In subsequent years, Backe, who was Darré’s number two in the Ministry of Agriculture, would assume growing responsibilities, surpassing Darré as the most powerful man in the Nazi food bureaucracy. Backe, together with Konrad Meyer, would make sure that both plant and animal academic breeders would rise to the challenges posed by the Four-Year Plan.[83]