But if Köhler’s work was aimed at changing the RNS recommendations for prevention of virus diseases,[115] his intensive use of test plants was too slow and costly to be used effectively on a large scale by commercial breeders and seed multipliers.[116] In 1936, the BRA’s director, while pleading for more funds for his institution from Minister of Food and Agriculture Richard W. Darré, acknowledged that it had not yet been possible to produce a quick standard procedure for RNS officials to evaluate commercial potato breeders and certify businesses that their seeds were free of virus infection.[117] In that same year, the Nazis’ Four-Year Plan was launched, putting more pressure on potato production to get Germany ready for waging war in four years. It was for that reason that Carl Stapp, also at the BRA, began to explore faster serological methods. Centrifuged sap from the tuber to be tested was dropped on thin wafers impregnated with virus antiserum produced by immunized rabbits. After 20 minutes of incubation it was possible to examine the probe under a microscope and determine the presence or absence of viruses. In 1943 Stapp claimed to have tested several thousand seeds from different commercial breeding houses and suggested the extended use of centrifuges, incubators, and microscopes to deploy the BRA method to the German fields. After a few weeks of training, every technician would allegedly be qualified to perform the serological procedure, which according to Stapp was to play a crucial role in guaranteeing Germany’s food security. We don’t have data about the spread of the method in the war years, but Stapp himself cited its use by breeding farms in the Lüneburger Heide (Lüneburg Heath).[118]
Experimental Systems and the Expansion of the Nazi Regime
It is important to retain from this story that each new experimental system developed by the BRA at its sprawling Dahlem facilities not only sustained a growing community of scientists tinkering with potato varieties, pathogens, and testing procedures; it also enhanced the presence of Darré’s Reichsnährstand in the German countryside. It was no small thing that BRA scientists offered the RNS a quick method for detecting viruses’ presence in a field. The capacity of the RNS to intervene in German agriculture grew with each new experimental system developed by the BRA. Research on wart allowed for cleansing the chaotic potato seed market, establishing a biological basis to differentiate between varieties; the Colorado Beetle mobilized Germans by the hundreds of thousands, children and women included, to defend the national soil from foreign intruders; viruses extended the RNS’s control over commercial breeders fields. In all these cases the experimental work had to do mainly with developing quick methods of inoculating a large number of potato specimens and identifying resistant varieties.
What might have been perceived as an innocent scientific activity similar to what phytopathologists were doing in other parts of the world was actually an important part of the expansion of the Nazi regime through the action of the RNS. To tinker with combinations of potatoes, pathogens, and inoculation tests, to tinker with experimental systems, led to new epistemic things such as Muller’s phytoalexin. But it also led to inclusion in the Reichssortenlist of varieties resistant to late blight, promising to overcome the food-shortage traumas of World War I and to make Germany ready for another war as was demanded by the Four-Year Plan. The RNS based its control of the seed circuit on the tests developed at the BRA. In the opposite direction, the BRA used the RNS’s regional structure to guarantee that its standards would reach the entire country.
There is more to this relationship than simply that the regime drew resources from science and vice versa.[119] It probably is better to speak of co-production of science and the state than to speak of resources as if science and politics were two different spheres.[120] The intimate relationship between the RNS and the BRA, with departments of the first present in the facilities of the second, points at tighter entanglements. As has been demonstrated, experimental systems at the BRA measured their success both by their capacity to generate new scientific things and by their contributions to the expansion of the Nazi regime.
This is not to make a general claim that under Nazism science had political dimensions usually absent under other political regimes. We now have more than enough studies that prove that there were political elements involved in doing science in liberal democracies or under communist dictatorships. The point here is to emphasize the particular politics associated with Nazism that phytopathology work contributed to. Research at the BRA constitutes a part of the larger story of expanding the Nazi infrastructure through the German territory, of trying to establish stronger ties between the population and the national soil, and of guaranteeing the “nutritional freedom” of the Volk and thus its biological survival, as repeated by Nazi ideology. The BRA standards made this ideology something more than just propaganda good for eloquent sentences in peasant festivals, contributing to the development of Nazism as a regime. Potatoes may seem mundane in comparison with rockets, nuclear reactors, autobahns, or experiments with humans. Nevertheless, they proved to be significant historical subjects to understand the Nazi regime at work.
4 Pigs: The Bodenständig Scientific Community in Nazi Germany
Breeding and Feeding Pigs and Germans
Richard Walther Darré—the main agrarian ideologue of Nazi Germany, who popularized the motto “Blut und Boden” and who was Minister of Food and Agriculture from 1933 to 1942—earned his credentials in völkisch circles through essays such as “Das Schwein als Kriterium für nordische Völker und Semitten” (“The pig as a distinguishing feature for northern peoples and Semites”).[1] In that essay, the pig was called “the leading animal” of the Germanic people. Not only did Darré argue that the sacrificial pig was a favorite among the gods of ancient Aryans; he argued that the pig’s physiological properties justified such distinguished treatment. Pigs, he noted, were not easily transported over long distances and thus were not suitable livestock for the nomadic Semites. The northern forests, home of the true Germans, provided acorns for pigs, whose high fat content helped local people to survive harsh winters. Pigs performed the distinction between agrarians and nomads—or in Nazi terms, between rooted Germans and uprooted Jews. Such considerations seem to lead to the mystical and archaic dimensions of Nazism and may suggest insoluble contradictions between Nazi ideology and modern rationality. Nevertheless, the life trajectory of Darré himself and his high esteem for the place of pigs in the German national community provide a vantage point from which to explore the entanglements between science and Nazism.
After his experience on the Western Front in World War I, which gave him the veteran status so typical of the members of fascist movements all across Europe, Darré tried to resume his studies at the Deutsche Kolonialschule in Hamburg in 1919. But only a year later, he was expelled, having been accused of lying. In 1922 he enrolled in the University of Halle to study agronomy.[2] Before the war, that university’s agricultural institute had been considered the best in all Germany. When Darré arrived there, two of its most distinguished faculty members, Theodor Roemer and Gustav Frölich, were committed to transforming plant and animal breeding into respectable academic disciplines through thorough use of Mendelian genetics.[3] Historians have already called attention to the importance of the work undertaken by Roemer at the Halle Institute of Crop Science and Plant Breeding.[4] Frölich and the Halle Institute for Animal Breeding and Dairy have received considerably less historical scrutiny, a historiographic gap that this chapter aims at filling.
115
E. Riehm, introduction to “Virustagung der Biologischen Reichsanstalt für Land- und Forstwirtschaft am 23 januar 1943,” p. 4.
116
C. Stapp, “Bedeutung und Wert der serologischen Virusdiagnose für die Kartoffelzüchtung,”
117
Director of the BRA to the Prussian and Reich Minister of Food and agriculture, “Förderung der Erforschung des Kartoffelabbaus” (31/3/1936), Bundesarchiv, R3602/2148.
118
This method required building on previous research on the physical and chemical properties of viruses undertaken at the BRA by Edgar Pfankusch and Gustav-Adolf Kausche since 1938. As historians of virus research in Germany have emphasized, we still don’t understand the relations between Pfankusch and Kausche’s works and the well-known researches at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institutes of Biology and Biochemistry, led by Butenandt.
119
The notion of ‘resources from one another’ is generally taken by historians of science as a productive way to talk about science and Nazism. See Mitchell Ash, “Wissenschaft und Politik als Ressourcen für einander,” in
120
Bruno Latour, “From Realpolitik to Dingpolitik,” in
1
Richard W. Darré,
2
On Darré, see Horst Gies, Richard Walther Darré und die nationalsozialistische Bauernpolitik in den Jahren 1930 bis 1933 (PhD dissertation, Frankfurt am Main, 1966); Anna Bramwell,
4
Historians have namely highlighted the importance of the Institute in establishing a new relation between academic and commercial plant breeders in which the former produced new varieties in rough form to be finished off and multiplied by the latter. See Wieland, ‘