Fascist Pigs: Technoscientific Organisms and the History of Fascism

^{Figure 5.3 A map of areas in Nazi eastern Europe cultivated with kok-sagyz. Dotted half-circles denote areas of cultivation abandoned after to the Soviet counter-attack; black half-circles indicate new areas under cultivation in 1944.}

^{(Jahresbericht der Gruppe Anbau und Versuchswesen für die Zeit vom 1. Januar 1943 bis 31. Dezember 1943, Bundesarchiv, NS19/3919)}

The first large scale planning for Auschwitz in Himmler’s grand scheme of the settlement of the east was to convert the area into a large experimental estate providing German settlers with training and “house nurseries, for the production of seed corn, garden seeds, berries, fruits,… and livestock (horses, pigs, cattle, hens).”[73] Rudolf Höss, the Auschwitz commandant appointed in May 1940, couldn’t be more enthusiastic about the prospectus of fully transforming his modest camp, destined until then to be no more than a regional prison for recalcitrant Poles waiting to be sent west as slave laborers. This was also his opportunity to finally fulfill his dream of having his own manor. Here is how Höss described his visit to the Reichsführer SS in November 1940: “Himmler became very lively and began planning, issuing one directive after another, and made notes about all the things that needed to be done in the estates around Auschwitz…. Certainly there were enough workers available. Every necessary agricultural experiment was to be tried there. Huge laboratories and plant cultivation departments had to be built…. The marshlands were to be drained and developed…. He continued with his agricultural planning even down to the smallest detail.”[74] The projected 10,000 inmates of the camp were to serve first and foremost the works of establishing this gigantic agricultural experiment station.

Himmler’s pastoral dreams for Auschwitz would radically change when IG Farben expressed interest for building in the area a gigantic chemical plant for the manufacture of synthetic fuel and rubber (buna).[75] The town of Auschwitz would still be a model settlement, but now inhabited by German engineers, clerks, and specialized workers recruited to a factory built on the comparative advantages of the place: a railway intersection, with abundant water sources, and offering a cheap labor force provided by the mass of prisoners managed by Himmler’s SS. In subsequent years a continuous stream of non-Jewish and Jewish laborers would be sent to Auschwitz to work in the chemical factory under horrible conditions—the death toll was of about 35,000 workers—although the large majority of the Jews that arrived from 1942 on went directly to the gas chambers. By then, most of the killing by the Nazis of Soviet and Polish Jews had already occurred (through shooting or gassing on site across occupied eastern Europe), and Auschwitz would mainly receive Jews from France, Belgium, Netherlands, Italy, Greece, and Hungary, deported not as labor force but to be exterminated. Auschwitz had thus the double nature of labor and death camp, setting it apart from most other camps that were either dedicated to one or the other. Its total death figures are around 1.1 million, including about a million Jews.[76]