Fascist Pigs: Technoscientific Organisms and the History of Fascism

Particularly interesting here is how Carl Kronacher, the head of the Institute for Animal Breeding and Domesticated Animals Genetics of the University of Berlin, undertook a revision of his previous studies in pig genetics. Among the leading German academic animal breeders, Kronacher was by far the most interested in fundamental processes of inheritance.[95] In 1931 he had been able to secure for his institute new stables in Berlin-Dahlem for demonstration and research in domesticated animals genetics.[96] The pigs’ stable held about a hundred animals of different breeds and crosses, including Edelschwein, veredelte Landschwein, Schwäbisch-Haller, Berkshires, Cornwalls, and Hildesheimer Landschwein, mixing commercial German breeds with English ones and with the traditional German breeds. Now, most of Kronacher’s experiments dealt with probing the Mendelian behavior of “formal properties”—color inheritance patterns and body conformation.[97] The data taken concerning carcass were qualitative, such as firmness of pork and lard, and didn’t include protein/fat ratios. As Kronacher clearly stated in 1936, this was because “before 1933 [the year of the Nazi seizure of power] lard weight had no economic significance.”[98]

It was only after 1933 that fat came to be seen as a crucial contribution of pigs to the nutritional freedom of the Volk—a perception that was to be intensified by the 1936 Four-Year Plan, which demanded different experimental measurements. From Kronacher’s publications it is obvious the inflection in direction of the nature of research undertaken in the Berlin Institute. Besides fat, Kronacher also began to pay attention to performance tests, investigating the relations between breeding performance (fertility, milk, weights of sows and piglets) and fattening performance.[99] Whereas in the cases of Gustav Frölich and Jonas Schmidt one finds scientists enlarging the visions of the Nazi politicians Richard Darré and Herbert Backe, Kronacher’s story seems to point at a more traditional relation of scientists adapting their works to the political demands of the moment.

After Kronacher’s retirement in 1936, Jonas Schmidt took over his position in the Berlin Institute. It is no surprise that crossings of German commercial breeds with fat exotic races were undertaken with renewed interest. This was seen as a faster way to close the country’s fat gap than the route of inbreeding Edelschwein and veredelte Landschwein. Great effort was put into crossing Mangalica pigs of Yugoslavia origin with those two breeds, so as to combine the extreme high fat content of the first with the fast growing rates of the second.[100] In Berlin, Schmidt now had the important contribution for swine body measurements of Friedrich Hogreve, who (benefitting from funding from the Forschungsdienst, led by Konrad Meyer) had used x rays to follow the development of pigs during the fattening process. Hogreve’s technique was based on the simple fact that a animal’s leaner parts produce a greater attenuation of x rays than fatter ones. Visual methods not only avoided the need to sacrifice animals to take carcass measurements; they also had the obvious advantage of offering data at different development stages.[101] Hogreve’s program was to establish visual standards corresponding to different stages of fat formation for each breed at controlled feeding conditions. Normal values for each breed of fat thickness at different development stages would enable breeders to evaluate early on the possible contribution of an animal to increase fat content in any given mating.[102] Hogreve thus promised a crucial tool to accelerate crossing procedures in order to have fatter pigs serving the nutritional freedom of the German Volk.

^{Figure 4.7 Swine fat content experiments with x-rays.}

^{(Friedrich Hogreve, “Ausbau eines neuen Forschungsweges zur Bestimmung der Fettwüchigkeit und Fettleistung in vercshiedenen Mastabschnitten beim lebenden Schwein verschiedener Rassenzugehörigkeit,” Zeitschrift für Züchtung 40, no. 3, 193): 377–395)}

Bodenständigkeit (Rootedness in the Soil)

Gustav Frölich summarizes for us the task of animal breeders serving the Nazi regime in his contribution to the ominous Festschrift published in 1939 by the German scientific community to celebrate Adolf Hitler’s fiftieth birthday: