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.
Taking into account the limitations of Buna production, hopes turned to Taraxacum kok-sagyz, a dandelion-like plant that Soviet plant breeders had been working with since the early 1930s.[47] The availability of kok-sagyz in the Soviet Union was a result of one of Nikolai Vavilov’s expeditions to central Asia in the Tien Shan Mountains, where local people were seen chewing its root. The third Soviet Five-Year Plan would make big investments in cultivating it and in establishing a network of experiment stations from Siberia to Uzbekistan to Byelorussia leading to Stalin bragging by the end of the 1930s that “there is everything in our country but rubber. But after a couple of year we’ll have that too.”[48] German plant breeders were quick to identify the importance of the undertaking and followed Russian efforts closely. In subsequent years they would seize the opportunity opened up by Nazi invasion of the east to plunder Soviet experiment stations and transfer to Germany all kok-sagyz plants and seeds they could find. Much of the research on kok-sagyz undertaken at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute of Plant Breeding in Berlin was based on taking over the Soviet research program.[49]
Susanne Heim has eloquently narrated this kok-sagyz story in her important volume on plant breeding at the Kaiser Wilhelm institutes during the Nazi years.[50] In this text I make use of archival sources already used by Heim: Himmler’s papers at the Bundesarchiv in Berlin. While Heim revealed the opportunism of scientists in grabbing up the possibilities opened by Nazi rule, I am more interested in revisiting these sources to interpret them through the lenses of colonial history. Indeed, when looking at the archival sources, one may see the similar issues faced by the actors involved in the Nazi rubber story and those in colonial labor regimes. This shouldn’t be surprising, for the issue at stake was no other than rubber, one of the classic ingredients of imperialism, the subject of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, epitome of European colonial violence in Africa.[51] As Mark Mazower has already suggested, and as Nazi rubber confirms, the history of the twentieth century fully justifies the description of Europe as a “Dark Continent.”[52]
In the summer of 1941 Hitler demanded that 400,000 hectares should be reserved for rubber plants cultivation in the invaded areas of the east to meet German needs. Following the Führer’s will, kok-sagyz was to be intensively explored in the war years as a substitute for natural rubber. Hans Stahl’s report of May 13, 1943, written after his expedition through the Ukraine as head of Himmler’s new office as Plenipotentiary for All Issues Related to Plant Rubber, is revealing of the colonial nature of kok-sagyz.[53] Stahl, a Navy officer, had been chosen because of his previous experience of heading the Krupp subsidiaries in northern Caucasus and of his fluency in Russian. His main task was to travel in the new conquered lands to inquire about the possibilities of extending kok-sagyz cultivation areas. In this first report he expressed his joy with the fulfillment of the target of 25,640 hectares planted with kok-sagyz for the Ukraine for the year 1943. Stahl emphasized the fact that this was done at about 6,700 farms, on each of which about 3½ hectares were planted with kok-sagyz.
40
Disciplinari Tipo, p. 5; Branzanti,
41
On the importance of looking at concrete differences and the way these evolved under a single imperial framework, instead of just taking the colonial as a flattening category, see Frederick Cooper,
42
See Mark Mazower,
43
On the general context of rubber production in World War II years, see William G. Clarence-Smith, “The battle for rubber in the Second World War: Cooperation and resistance,” in
44
The best discussion on rubber and the Nazi regime can be found on pages 97–153 of Heim,
45
Diarmuid Jeffreys,
47
There is not much of a secondary bibliography information on the Soviet efforts to breed a rubber substitute. For American sources, see Mark Finlay,
50
In addition to Heim’s work, see Alexander Schlichter,
51
On the violent colonial regimes in the Belgian Congo and Latin America associated with rubber production, see Adam Hochschild,
53
Hans Stahl, Bericht über die Reise nach der Ukraine vom 21.4–12.5.1943, 5/13/1943, Bundesarchiv, NS 19/3920, pp. 25–36.