We don’t know many details about all those agricultural projects at Auschwitz, but the story of breeding of a rubber substitute is well documented.[80] The plant-breeding practices undertaken at the Rajsko camp don’t seem too different from the undertakings dealt with in previous chapters in other agricultural experiment stations, with the obvious distinguishing notorious feature of the use of female forced labor for conducting experiments. In 1945 the Commando Plant Breeding of the camp counted with 150 female inmates, under the direction of Joachim Caesar, an SS Obersturmbannführer with a doctorate from the University of Halle and who had headed the Training Office of the SS Racial and Settlement Main Office.[81] The aim was to produce, through pedigree breeding, pure lines of kok-sagyz with roots with high latex content, multiply them, and research optimal cultivation conditions.[82] Seeds were first sown in a greenhouse from which plants were reproduced through vegetative means from cuttings from the root section. Each woman was responsible for gathering the data from 1,000 plants: date of first leaves, size of leaves, date of flowering, size and quantity of flowers, and date of first seed. The more promising exemplars were reproduced through inbreeding and gathered in protected individual 20-by-20-centimeter boxes covered with tulle to avoid cross-pollination.
This book doesn’t explore the important gender dimensions involved in plant breeding and the repeated references to the alleged advantages of employing women in practices demanding careful handling and precise registration. But it should be noticed how gender and labor interact in this story: while men were used as forced labor in the industrial IG Farben chemical complex, women were the gardeners and computers of the plant-breeding operations. Auschwitz reproduced the gendered colonial labor division at work of the Third Reich beyond the area delimited by barbed wire: while men were rounded by Sauckel’s forced-labor operation to work in German industries, women (as well as children) were put in barracks adjacent to SS-managed rubber plantations. Significantly, this was a division also common in European colonies in Africa, with women forced to cultivate cash crops while men were rounded seasonally by the colonial state to work in road building or in mining.
I insisted above on the importance of registration practices for plant breeding and one would think forced labor would be particularly prone to the repetitive, monotonous, and tiresome job involved in producing pure lines. Interestingly enough, the inmates’ oral accounts of sabotage referred the easiness of making all the effort irrelevant by just messing with the records of each plant.[83] As terrorists identify the critical points of an infrastructure, so the inmates had no doubts about the centrality of keeping good records for scientific plant-breeding operations. We don’t know the actual dimension of the sabotage, but it seems that even in an over controlled space as the one of the concentration camp it was impossible to follow each single move of the inmates.
The best lines were transferred to the cultivation fields outside the greenhouse to investigate growing conditions and to reproduce enough seed to be distributed among different experimental plots across eastern Europe to test behavior under diverse environments. Local agricultural experiment stations were responsible for the adaptation of Auschwitz breeding lines in the different occupied areas.[84] Also, a few farmers were chosen for reproducing seed from supplies dispensed by Auschwitz that would then be distributed to the actual cultivation sites. In the opposite direction, if the first seeds had arrived in Auschwitz through the plundering of Soviet breeders previous efforts, each Sondernführer was now to send back to Auschwitz the most promising kok-sagyz plants found in their fields.[85] As in the other cases dealt with above, Auschwitz can be perceived as a center of circulation, with seeds coming in and out through which it sustained colonial plantations providing the empire with key raw materials through the exploitation of indigenous labor force.
Historians may will to insist that stories such as the one of Nazi rubber substitute only prove the irrationality of Himmler and the Nazi elite in general, describing it as “purely a matter of prestige,” characteristic of figures always more concerned with grandiose visions than with effective results.[86] The doubtful historical relevance of kok-sagyz seems confirmed as well by the meager results of the endeavor, for no more than a few hundreds of tons were ever delivered to the Reich. I would like to contend that such metrics of success and failure, a metrics put in place by the very same historical actors, doesn’t account for the significance of the case in question. The historical importance of kok-sagyz doesn’t prove the alleged irrationality of the Nazi regime. It shows instead the scandalous continuities of Nazi colonial Europe with colonial situations in Africa.
First, one should consider that similar projects by other countries prove that Nazis were not alone in searching intensively for alternative sources of rubber during World War II. Every major power had a program to increase rubber output, programs that only made sense in the particular conditions of the war. Besides the Soviet case, on which, as mentioned, the Nazi one was built, it is important to acknowledge in particular that the United States made huge investments on research for domestic production of rubber through kok-sagyz. The federal government subsidized experimental work on kok-sagyz in dozens of states, having built a pilot plant near Philadelphia. Besides the multiple problems with pests and weeds, American enthusiasts of the rubber substitute also faced the challenges posed by a plant requiring continuous hand care. If Nazis relied on Himmler’s control of an immense pool of forced labor to overcome the lack of interest of local peasants to cultivate kok-sagyz, the hiring of migrant workers by American farmers proved that the scheme would be very difficult to implement in the United States: many members of a Jamaican contingent hired to cultivate a kok-sagyz field in Wisconsin refused to work on the cold and rainy autumn days as demanded by the fragile plant.[87] In fact, from June 1944 on, most of the breeding works in the US had stopped. Even under conditions of mobilization for war, the US government did thus not impose the kind of control over labor that the Third Reich did.
Disturbingly enough, this was apparently not true for other European empires. Gaullists mobilized in early 1942 thousands of forced workers for the natural rubber plantations of French Cameroun. In Tanganyika (today Tanzania), in March of 1942, British authorities conscripted about 11,000 indigenous people for periods of twelve months to work on rubber plantations previously owned by Germans.[88] The difference of these cases with the Nazi colonial system is that once the war came to an end both the French and British empires gradually accommodated indigenous demands for better labor conditions and possibilities for social mobility. This didn’t prevent African independence movements; indeed, it may have accelerated them. It was much more than the Nazis had ever offered to the eastern European populations. As was argued above, the colonial trajectories identified by Frederic Cooper that opened historical dynamics in French or British Africa were just not available for fascist empires.
80
Heim,
81
Joachim Caesar was responsible not only for the Plant Breeding Kommando, but for the entire Rajsko camp.
82
I follow Zieba,
84
Caesar, Jahresbericht, pp. 52–53. One of the experiment stations was located in Minsk, and another planned for Bauska, 72 kilometers south of Riga. Efforts were also undertaken to put in place one for southern climates similar to the ones of the Dark Sea. A large plot in southern France was considered for this effect. Stahl, also mentions in his report of 1943.
88
Clarence-Smith,