My main argument for taking a close look at kok-sagyz is its ability to reveal the nature of Nazi colonial rule in eastern Europe—that is, the nature of the would-be destiny of those native populations not removed to make space for German settlers. They would either cultivate a cash crop in their own plots for which they would be underpaid and that jeopardized their food security, an arrangement typical of many other colonial situations, or they would be forced to do it in more brutal conditions in SS-managed plantations, a reality that had already disappeared of most European colonies of the time. Auschwitz not only contributed with its gas chambers to realize the Nazis’ dreams of a European continent emptied of Jewish people; it also sustained, through its kok-sagyz seeds, a new colonial order and its forced-labor regime. The apparent minor agriculture projects of the camp call attention to the past colonial future of the Third Reich. They reveal a Nazi New Order in Europe only too familiar in other continents under European colonialism. Rubber production from kok-sagyz never reached significant production levels, but the pure lines with high latex content coming out of Auschwitz made plausible Himmler visions of SS-managed plantations throughout the steppes of eastern Europe, supplying the Reich’s war machine. Himmler’s monstrous dreams originated from his irrational racist ideology, but they were converted into alleged feasible projects by the making and growing of technoscientific organisms, in this case, high-latex kok-sagyz.
Cotton Breeding and Portugal’s Colonial Regime in Mozambique
Aurélio Quintanilha (1892–1987) had very different political allegiances from those of Armando Maugini, the main colonial agriculture expert of fascist Italy, or Joachim Caesar, the head of the Auschwitz plant-breeding research. The Portuguese scientist biography seems to confirm instead the traditional narrative about the difficulties of conducting scientific research under fascist regimes. Quintanilha’s dismissal and compulsive retirement in 1935 from his position as Full Professor of the Botanical Institute of the University of Coimbra, when his scientific reputation in the field of cytology and genetics was indisputable, is in accordance with the well-known purges of scientists under the dictatorial regime that ruled Portugal from 1926 until 1974.[89] His expulsion of the University was part of the Portuguese version of Gleichschaltung imposed by the 1935 decree that ordered the “retirement or firing of civilian or military State functionaries who have revealed or reveal a spirit of opposition to the fundamental principles of the Political Constitution [of 1933] or that don’t guarantee cooperation in fulfilling the superior ends of the State.”[90] The decision by the Minister of Education, Eusébio Tamagnini (a physical anthropologist at the same University of Coimbra, an enthusiast for eugenics, and a local leader of the fascist movement—the blueshirts) to shut down Quintanilha’s laboratory has been perceived as proof of the antiscientific nature of Salazar’s dictatorship.[91] By denying Quintanilha access to his laboratory, the results of seven years of research on cytology and genetics of fungi were totally lost.
In addition, Salazar, who had been also a professor of financial sciences at the University of Coimbra, felt strong personal reluctance toward Quintanilha, a supporter of anarcho-syndicalism who embodied all he stood against. In the years they coincided in Coimbra, the would-be dictator would even refuse to shake hands with him. Salazar, always in his severe black suit, felt insulted by a character that dared to show up in public wearing tennis sportswear and exhibited the cosmopolitan manners earned in his Berlin and Paris years.[92]
In 1936, after the shutting down of his laboratory, Quintanilha escaped the regime’s repression and left Portugal for France to work at the Parisian Natural History Museum. But four years later fascism would stand on his way again. He voluntarily joined the French Army to fight the Nazi invasion of France in 1940, and after the defeat he returned to Portugal where his previous scientific connections promised him a warm welcome. His fellow geneticist Antonio Câmara, not making much of a case of political divergences, assured Quintanilha of a position at the National Agricultural Experiment Station. Although Câmara, as we saw in chapter 2, was one of the main figures of the scientific establishment of Salazar’s New State, the dictator himself interceded personally to prevent Quintanilha to be hired by the Experiment Station. In the next two years, Quintanilha could only count with a part-time job at the institution’s canteen to maintain himself and his family.
In 1943, Quintanilha was finally recruited by the Board of Export of Colonial Cotton (Junta de Exportação do Algodão Colonial—JEAC), to direct the newly created Center for Cotton Scientific Research (Centro de Investigação Científica Algodoeira—CICA) in Mozambique, Portugal’s colony in Eastern Africa. Quintanilha was thus sent to a far-away post, isolated from the political intrigues of the metropole, following the regime’s policy of sending opposition members to its African Colonies. He would remain in Mozambique until 1982.
I intend to suggest that his Mozambique years shouldn’t be seen just through the lens of forced internal exile. Delving into Quintanilha’s scientific practices by paying attention to his object of research in the period—cotton—reveals the limits of the traditional historical approach of studying the relations between science and fascism as two separate entities. This is in fact an extreme case in which the individual political preferences of a scientist, totally contrary to fascism, prove to be irrelevant when inquiring the role of his research for the expansion of the regime. One of the scientists more vocal in his opposition to Salazar became involved through his apparent innocuous scientific practices in what was probably the darkest story of Portuguese fascism.
The Berlin Conference of 1885 that officially launched the scramble for Africa granted Portugal formal control over the territory of present day Mozambique. Portuguese presence in the territory in the first decades of the twentieth century was nevertheless limited, as it had been in the centuries before, ceding large plots of land to chartered companies formed by international capitals with discretionary power inside concessionary areas. Most of the income of these companies derived from extracting taxes from African populations living under their domain and exporting conscripted labor to South African gold mines or Katanga copper mines. The economy of Mozambique was totally dependent on its neighbors, with railways transporting ores from South African and southern Rhodesian mines to be shipped at the Mozambican ports of Lourenço Marques and Beira, and returning in the opposite direction carrying conscripted laborers to work in the mines. Salazar’s New State would demand more from a territory that was supposed to provide raw materials and markets for metropolitan industries.[93]
The enthusiasts of the imperial vision were not limited to industrialists dreaming of colonial markets. Young army officers also called attention insistently to the danger of occupation by rival European powers of the country’s African possessions due to scarce Portuguese presence on the ground. These officials would be instrumental in the military coup of 1926 that inaugurated the dictatorship, which assumed as one of its main tasks the “nationalization of the empire.”[94] The phrase meant not only that Portuguese national life would be geared toward the empire but also that life in the colonies would have Portugal as its main referent. In 1930, the Colonial Act, issued when Salazar assumed temporarily the post of Minister of the Colonies, solemnly institutionalized the relations between Nation and Empire: “It is in the organic essence of the Portuguese Nation to undertake the historical function of possessing and colonizing overseas domains and to civilize indigenous populations.”[95] One could find this same imperial rhetoric among the leaders of the previous Republican regime, but the push for Empire would be greatly intensified under Salazar’s dictatorship. In fact, the building of an imperial bloc would become one of the defining features of Portuguese fascism. Significantly enough, the regime would not end until 1974, when there was a “red carnations revolution” led by young military officers refusing to keep fighting the independence movements in Guinea Bissau, Angola, and Mozambique. With the empire in question, the regime finally disintegrated.
89
For biographical data on Quintanilha, see A. Fernandes, “Prof. Dr. Aurélio Quintanilha,” separata do
91
On the figure of Eusebio Tamagnini and his Coimbra context, see Gonçalo Duro dos Santos,
93
José Negrão, Cem Anos de Economia da Família Rural Africana (Promédia, 2001); Malyn Newitt,
94
Valentim Alexandre,”Ideologia, economia e política: a questão colonial na implantação do Estado Novo,”