Fascist Pigs: Technoscientific Organisms and the History of Fascism

In spite of all the rhetoric about masses of hundreds of thousands of Italian peasants crossing the Mediterranean to settle in Ethiopia, the data for the Galla Sidamo region—coffee’s center of origin—suggest otherwise. By January 1940 there were no more than two group settlements forming a total of 55 Italian homesteads with a maximum of 50 hectares each, summing together about 2,300 hectares. In the same date there were already also in the Galla and Sidamo about 25 capitalist concessions, the large majority of them coffee plantations. Together they made about 32,000 hectares.[40] The colonial officers justified the low numbers with the fact that Galla Sidamo, although considered the most promissory of all the regions for agriculture production, had been the last part of the territory to be pacified and was thus also the one in which the road network took more time to complete. But the tendency was clear: a much faster pace of growing areas of large plantations than Italian peasant settlements, contrary to fascist propaganda of the “proletarian empire’; increasing control by the colonial agricultural services of indigenous coffee growers practices, that accounted for the largest portion of the region production.

It is probable that in subsequent years, with the development of transportation infrastructure, the presence of settlers would increase, as had happened in Libya. In any case, the emphasis put in coffee production, as one of the main contributions of Ethiopia for the Imperial economy would have had to lead Italian colonial administration to face the double problem of how to guarantee a stable workforce for the growing number of plantations and white settlements and, at the same time, promote coffee production among the natives following the rules established at Malcó. In other words, coffee production was to define much of Italian colonial presence in Ethiopia. Large capitalist plantations using indigenous labor, white settlements of Italian small farmers, and various indigenous production systems were all to be addressed through coffee. But by early May 1941 the East African Campaign led by the British Middle East Command brought Haile Selassie back to Addis Ababa bringing to an end Mussolini’s grandiose visions of restoring the Roman Empire in the Mediterranean.

European Heart of Darkness : Rubber and the Role of Auschwitz as a Colonial Agricultural Experiment Station

The next month, Hitler was launching Operation Barbarossa, which would bring a large portion of eastern Europe under Nazi control and would fulfill, if only briefly, the wildest dreams of producing Lebensraum for Germany in the east. Hitler’s Empire, as any other vast imperial formation, was a combination of different and heterogeneous arrangements.[41] Some territories were simply annexed to the German Reich holding the same status as Germany’s previous provinces and became part of the core of the empire (Altreich); territories such as the General Government or the Reich Commissariat Ukraine were not part of the core but were under German civil administration; occupied territories as those east of the Dnepr river were under direct military rule.[42] Here, I want to suggest that plantation schemes are fruitful historical objects in highlighting the practices of Nazi imperialism in action. For that, I will look at one of Heinrich Himmler’s grandiloquent titles, his nomination in February 1943 as Plenipotentiary for All Issues Related to Plant Rubber (Reichsführer SS als Sonderbeauftragter für Pflanzenkautschuck).

The war with the Soviet Union cut the Third Reich from its supply routes for natural rubber from eastern Asia.[43] In fact, the dependency of Germany from imports of natural rubber had been identified in the Four-Year Plan of 1936 as a major weakness of the German economy.[44] The push toward rubber autarky explains much of the investment in the expensive production of synthetic rubber—Buna—by IG Farben and its gigantic facility in Auschwitz.[45] Buna production nevertheless was unable to cover civil and military needs. By early 1941 the Wehrmacht acknowledged that its rubber reserves would only last another month, with the risk of immobilizing trucks and tanks and thus bringing to a halt the entire German war machine.[46] The immediate needs to carry on the war effort were covered by the taking over of rubber stocks from conquered territories, but a more sustainable source was needed.