In May of 1944, Heinrich Himmler, Reichsführer of the SS, wrote to SS Brigadenführer Helmut Körner, who as Landesbauernführer was responsible for agriculture in the Nazi regime’s civil administration in the Ukraine, concerning the fate of a flock of Karakul sheep that had recently arrived at the SS-Truppenübungsplatz (military training area) at Böhmen.[1] The flock had reached the vast Waffen-SS military training area in the territory of the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia after the rapid German retreat on the Eastern Front. Himmler, acknowledging his “great interest” in the raising of Karakul sheep, and invoking the status of the SS as fiduciary of the flock, made clear his intentions of acquiring at least one third of the animals. The presence of the sheep in contested territory demanded careful negotiations among the SS, the Wehrmacht, the Ministry of Food and Agriculture, and the Ministry for the Occupied Eastern Territories. In the end, Himmler was able to transfer all the sheep to SS custody and to have them moved to an SS farm in newly occupied Hungary.[2] The point here is not to delve into the well-known tensions between Himmler’s SS and Alfred Rosenberg’s Reichsministerium für die besetzten Ostgebiete (Ministry for the Occupied Eastern Territories). Instead of getting lost in the Nazi bureaucratic maze, let us follow the sheep and see what they may reveal about Germany’s eastward expansion and about the fascist imperial ventures of Italy and Portugal.[3]
More than just building a comparative argument, I intend to offer a trans-imperial narrative woven via the travels of the Karakul, discussing the significance of the frontier experience for fascism. As we saw, the three fascist regimes inherited different things from their predecessors. Portugal already possessed an empire. Germany launched a violent campaign to build a new one after the lost of its African territories. Italy had both an “old colony” in Libya and new colony in recently conquered Ethiopia. But such formal differences tend to blur when looked at closely. Only after the pacification campaign in Cyrenaica in 1930–1933, which was no less brutal than the 1935–36 Abyssinian campaign, did Libya support the dreams of Italian settlers populating what was then known as the fourth shore (Quarta Sponda) of Grande Italia. In other words, a major portion of the Libyan territory should be perceived as a new colony. Also, Portugal’s possessions in Africa looked impressive when viewed on a map, but the European presence there was squalid.[4] Salazar’s regime would make big efforts to “nationalize the empire” through increased presence of white settlers and the tightening of economic ties between the colonies and the metropole.[5] Indeed, from their very early stages on, each of the three regimes had invested in making its empire a guarantor of national independence, aiming to form a self-sufficient bloc and to cut ties with an international system dominated by England, the United States, and France. The empire would also constitute the solution to the “population surpluses” of the three countries that fed the previous flux of emigration to the Americas. The example of the Karakul sheep will enable us to see how such expansion projects were to be materialized in the territories of the empire—how communities of settlers were to sustain themselves in new frontier regions and to contribute to the imperial economies of the fascist regimes.
Karakul sheep are highly valued animals, originating from Bukhara in Uzbekistan, whose pelts are used to produce the famous Persian fur coats also known as Astrakhan. The growing interest in these sheep since the second half of the nineteenth century is part of the wider story of the replacement of vanishing wild animals with domesticated ones to supply urban consumers with fur goods.[6] In Germany, Leipzig had been an important center of the production of fur goods since the Middle Ages, importing raw skins from Russia and exporting pelts to the main European cities. Karakul pelts from central Asia first appeared in the Leipzig market in 1850.[7] The resistance of Karakul to drought (attributable to their fat tails) and their high value in the international fur market allegedly enabled the settlement of brave pioneer communities in frontier settings, making the Karakul a perfect companion species for fascist imperial expansion.[8]
In the difficult military context of the spring of 1944, Himmler’s detailed inquiry about Karakul may seem intriguing. Such attention indicates not only the high value of luxurious Persian fur coats in Nazi Germany but also Himmler’s high expectations regarding the role of Karakul in the German colonial rule in eastern Europe.[9] Sheep raising had been identified as part of the economic activities sustaining the settlers of the General Plan East, the Nazi blueprint for the future of eastern Europe drafted by the geographers, demographers, rural sociologists, and landscape architects of Himmler’s Commissariat for the Reinforcement of Germandom (Reichskommissariat für die Festigung deutschen Volkstums—RKFdV).[10] The plan, built on the killing, expulsion, and enslavement of tens of millions of Jews and Slavs to make space for brave settlers of German descent, was to make the region into a planner’s Eden, with towns, villages, forests, and industrial areas carefully distributed in the landscape and connected by a network of railway lines and Autobahnen.[11] In the version presented at the end of 1942 to Himmler by Konrad Meyer, chief of the planning office of the RKFdV, the complete Germanization of the areas annexed from the Soviet Union was to be accomplished within 30 years by the settlement of 10 million Germans from the Reich, more than a million from “Germanic” countries, and 200,000 more from overseas. To accomplish such grandiose plan, 45 million people were to be removed from their homes in central and eastern Europe, 31 million of them to be deported further east or murdered, and 14 million of them to remain in the area as forced workers.
In July of 1942, when Hitler approved the plans for the settlement of the east, Himmler confessed it was “the happiest day of his life” and boasted about the “greatest piece of colonization that the world will ever have seen,” making the case for looking at the German invasion of the Soviet Union as the last great land grab in the long and bloody history of European colonialism.[12] In the outskirts of the empire, in its most remote eastern regions, the new villages were to be inhabited by Aryan armed peasants forming a defensive wall repelling the barbaric Asian hordes. The “Go East” push was to be driven by the establishment of colonial outposts trusted with the double task of “defending the ultimate ownership of the land conquered by the sword” and increasing “German blood” to guarantee demographic expansion. In September of 1942, from his secret field headquarters in Zhytomyr, Ukraine, Himmler declared: “[T]his Germanic East extending as far as the Urals must be cultivated like a hothouse of Germanic blood…. The next generations of Germans and history will not remember how it was done, but rather the goal.”[13] If, as in Frederick Jackson Turner’s thesis, the experience of the western frontier was the basis of American democracy, for Nazi ideologues the settlement of the eastern frontier was to become the source of German cultural rejuvenation and the materialization of Germany’s manifest destiny.[14]
1
Himmler to Körner, May 1944, Bundesarchiv, Persönlicher Stab Reichsführer-SS, NS 19/2596, “Unterbringung des Gestüts und der Karakul-Schafherde von Dr. Schäfer in Ungarn.” The tittle of Landesbauernführer corresponded to Körner’s rank in the structure of the Reichsnährstand as responsible for the Saxony Landesbauernschaft.
3
This straightforward methodology of following sheep around is much inspired by Sarah Franklin’s
4
In 1924 there were no more than 40,000 whites in Angola, in a territory 14 times the size of Portugal.
5
Valentim Alexandre, “Ideologia, economia e política: a questão colonial na implantação do Estado Novo,”
6
In Canada and Siberia, for example, mink and fox farmers would progressively replace hunters as frontier folk producing animal skins for international markets. See L. Adametz,
7
Gustav Frölich and Hans Hornitschek,
8
Whereas Donna Haraway suggested in
9
On Nazi Germany and luxury consumption, see Irene Guenther,
10
Robert Lewis Koehl,
11
Joachim Wolschke-Bulmahn, “Violence as the basis of National Socialist landscape planning in the ‘Annexed Eastern Areas,’” in
13
Quoted in Wendy Lower, “A new ordering of space and race: Nazi colonial dreams in Zhytomyr, Ukraine, 1941–1944,”
14
For an inspired exploration of the relation between the American frontier and the “Drang nach Osten” in Nazi ideology, see David Blackbourn,