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The arrival of the Karakul flock from the Ukraine in Bohemia in the spring of 1944 is a prosaic reminder of the short life spans of such grandiose visions. When Himmler wrote to Körner about the Karakul flock, the Red Army had already expelled the Wehrmacht from much of the Ukraine, a key region for the establishment of the New Order. The archived records don’t tell us exactly where in the Ukraine the sheep came from, but it is reasonable to suppose they originated from the Karakul Experiment Station that had been established at Kriwoj Rog in 1941 by Rosenberg’s Ministry.[15] That city, located in southeastern Ukraine, was designated in the General Plan East as a ”base of colonization” for the Gotengau, which means it would be settled by SS “military-peasants,” the German frontier men.[16] As Himmler’s physician, Felix Kersten, recalled, the members of the SS dreamed of the grand estates in the east that had been promised to them as the first fruits of victory.[17] Himmler himself had introduced a compulsory savings system for the SS, noting that “an SS man, who in due course saves 2,000 to 3,000 Reich marks, has thereby laid the foundation for a settlement.”[18] And this was not an SS exclusive; many regular soldiers of the Wehrmacht also imagined themselves as landowners exploiting the labor of Slavic helots.[19] Karakul farms with more than 3,000 animals would require especially ambitious dreamers. These numbers actually contributed to the difficulties in transferring Himmler’s flock to the west, since, as Oswald Pohl—the responsible for the SS administration office—complained, there simply was no available land for the animals in the old Reich or in the Generalgouvernement (the German-occupied area of central Poland).[20]

^{Figure 6.2 Heinrich Himmler (wearing eyeglasses) at a 1941 exhibition dedicated to “Planning and Building in the East.”}

^{(Bundesarchiv, Bild 146–1974–079–57 / CC-BY-SA 3.0)}

The General Plan East also noted that “settlers have the obligation to be exemplary managers and pioneers in the agricultural, technical, and economic aspects of farming.”[21] Settlers were to make intensive use of tractors, chemical fertilizers, and new seeds and animals bred for increased productivity. The Karakul Experiment Station at Kriwoj Rog was thus part of a technoscientific infrastructure built to produce the proper environment for the flourishing of settlers’ communities in the frontier—in this case, supplying “armed peasants” with valuable rams and ewes and offering expertise on “scientific animal husbandry,” as suggested in the General Plan East.[22] It was an outpost of Empire preparing the place to receive pioneers after the first clearing of the terrain.

As much as Hitler mused about the transformation of the Russian steppe into “one of the loveliest gardens in the world” tended by Aryan settlers, this was not to be a creation ex nihilo.[23] We know that both the colonial governor (the infamous Gauleiter Erich Koch) and Himmler were violently opposed to any form of indirect rule and curtailed any talk of participation in the New Order by local Ukrainian elites, who were quickly dismissed as Negervolk (“niggers”).[24] But even the most radical Nazis succumbed to the limits of Imperial power.[25] It was not only that Germans had kept the soviet kolkhozes (collective farms) in order to guarantee the agriculture output of the region.[26] As Susanne Heim has made clear, much of the German agricultural scientific and technical infrastructure in the east was based on taking over Soviet agriculture research institutes.[27] Considering the highly developed exploration of Karakul sheep by Soviet animal breeders, it seems reasonable to suppose that the Germans’ Kriwoj Rog Experiment Station in southeast Ukraine was also based on preexistent Soviet research efforts.[28] That hypothesis is supported by the fact that when the Karakul flock was moved west to protect it from the Soviet advance in the Ukraine, 26 Russian technicians and veterinarians were brought with it even though some Nazi officials were reluctant to allow Slavs to enter the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia.[29]

Karakul as Model Organism and Industrialized Organism: Curl Formation and Fur Markets

The head of the Kriwoj Rog Karakul Experiment Station was Hans Hornitschek, who had temporarily left his post at the Animal Breeding Institute of the University of Halle to assist the Ministry for the Occupied Eastern Territories in settling the frontier. When Rosenberg’s ministry tried to hire Hornitschek for a permanent position, the director of the Halle Agricultural College, Robert Gärtner, vehemently refused, arguing his importance in the handling of Halle’s own Karakul flock. After the premature death in 1940 of his mentor Gustav Frölich, the main animal-breeding scientist at Halle, Hornitschek earned the status of first German expert in the breeding of Karakul, being the co-author with Frölich of the “Das Karakulschaf und seine Zucht” (“The Karakul sheep and its breeding”).[30] Gärtner reminded Rosenberg that the more than 500 Karakul sheep in Halle were the purest flock in all Europe and had already contributed to the ongoing colonization efforts through the distribution of certified rams in the eastern territories. If Hornitschek left Halle for Kriwoj Rog, Gärtner warned, the quality of the Halle animals was doomed to decline, and that would have severe consequences for the production of Karakul pelts all over Europe.[31]

As evidence of the importance ascribed to the Halle flock, one need only consider another transfer of Karakul, this one from the University of Halle to the new Kaiser Wilhelm Institute of Animal Breeding in Dummerstorf near Rostock in the Province of Mecklenburg and back. After Gustav Frölich assumed the direction of the latter in 1939, the University of Halle had agreed to lease its sheep to the Kaiser Wilhelm Society for no more than three years so that Frölich could continue his research program in his new post at Dummerstorf.[32] As I have mentioned, Frölich asserted that the institute would be the largest scientific animal-breeding facility in Europe, exploring the potential of artificial insemination to bring rapid change in the animal-breeding scene of the newly colonized areas to the east. I also have mentioned the laboratory facilities, residential buildings, a school, a swimming pool, a community building with social facilities, farm buildings, and of course many stables, with green areas surrounding all facilities, and streets and squares lined with dense rows of trees. As the annual report of the Kaiser Wilhelm Society proudly asserted, the architects of the new institute were able to design not only a bodenständig institute but also a model for the settler communities the Germans would establish on their eastern frontier.

^{Figure 6.3 The Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Animal Breeding depicted as a model settlement, 1941.}

^{(Jahrbuch der Kaiser Wilhelm Gesellschaft, 1941)}

Asked to put a price to the operation of transferring Karakul from Halle to Dummerstorf, Frölich argued that his flock was priceless, since there would be no way to acquire new purebred animals—their area of origin was controlled by the Soviet Union.[33] But the Kaiser Wilhelm Society paid the university 126,900 RM for the leasing of 142 rams and 380 ewes. In comparison, the society paid Frölich 15,000 RM a year as director of the institute. When Frölich died, in August of 1940, the university was quick to demand the immediate return of the sheep, and in December of that year they were back in their home stable in Halle.[34] Also back in Halle was Hornitschek, who had followed both the Karakul and Frölich to Dummerstorf.