At times, there were more pigs than eligible voters in East Germany. In Maasdorf near Köthen, a memorial to this era still stands – a time when the supposedly successful model of industrial animal breeding began to slowly drag its creators into the abyss.
The box in the hallway outside the small office wing hints at the depths of the past. Syringes and ampoules lie there, used and unused, labeled "Serum." Swabs for wound tests and sealed sample tubes are also present.
For years, the box has waited in the stairwell of the pig high-rise near Maasdorf for its next use. But the former inhabitants have long since left the six-story building outside the village of 300 inhabitants near Köthen.
The Pigs Factory
Three years ago, the last operator – an entrepreneur from the Netherlands – closed the facility after persistent protests from animal rights activists in order to modernize it. But since then, no construction crews have arrived to bring the meat processing plant, inaugurated in 1970, up to scratch.
Instead, Europe's only pig high-rise has become a pilgrimage site for ruin tourists and lovers of so-called "lost places."
Behind a steel door, one enters the meat production halls; a box of syringes stands in front of it. The last shift in Maasdorf ended in 2018.
From a distance, the "vertical farming" facility looks almost like a house. Inside, it's dark, and a lingering smell of pig farming still hangs in the air. Young visitors have vandalized the offices, and the stairwells leading up to the halls with their steel pens for 500 sows are decorated with graffiti by football fans. Behind rusty steel doors, one enters the barn areas - dark rooms with low ceilings where piglets were bred automatically for almost 50 years.
The Communist Pigs
Piglets that the GDR desperately needed. In his book "Communist Pigs," US historian Thomas Fleischman describes the large-scale facility as a tangible testament to a grand strategy of the East German leadership.
From the late 1960s onward, the East German government focused on industrial-scale pig farming. Fleischman attributes this to the increased trade between East and West that became possible at that time.
East Germany suddenly gained access to loans in the West - and thus also to grain imports from its class enemy. "They believed this would allow East Germany to develop into an export nation," says Fleischman. The pig was one of the pillars upon which the East German agricultural miracle was to rest.
Not into a barn
With the help of the Soviet Union, a prestigious project for modern animal husbandry was built in Maasdorf. The pig high-rise is not a barn, but an industrial facility based on the concept of the vertically integrated farm, developed in the USA. Here, the barns are stacked on top of each other according to the animals' life stages and connected by elevators.
Production in the iron vaults - today filled with cobwebs and abandoned tools - aimed at year-round farrowing. Feeding was adjusted to the animals' life cycle in the service of greater efficiency. A system as cruel as it was productive.
The skyscraper of the Pig Nation
From the meat conveyor belts in Maasdorf, an endless stream of piglets fed the pig-growing nation of East Germany, where in the 1980s there were almost more pigs than adult people. At the height of its agricultural success, East Germany produced more pork than West Germany and Great Britain combined.
Citizens profited from export revenues, but also directly from the abundance of pigs: In the mid-1980s, every East German consumed 100 kilograms of pork per year—a sign of prosperity, but also a cause for unrest whenever the East German leadership had to ramp up pig exports to generate foreign currency in the short term. Then there were shortages of meat in the supermarkets.
175,000 Animals
It had long since become clear that the large-scale pig industry couldn't deliver on its promises. Fattened with Western grain, pigs were supposed to generate high foreign currency earnings, which the state intended to use to build housing, keep prices low, and invest in new economic sectors. Instead, however, the farms, with up to 175,000 animals, produced more manure than the fields could absorb.
The liquid manure had to be secretly dumped in the forest. Leaky tanks poisoned the drinking water. The GDR Institute for Water Management warned of long-term consequences as early as the mid-1980s.
They couldn't save the socialism
Citizens were outraged by the environmental damage. The pigs, which had been meant to save socialism, had become a source of discontent. Yet in Maasdorf, the "Communist Pigs" concept outlived the GDR by almost three decades.
Until its closure in 2018, around 500 so-called hybrid sows were still kept there. Poor pigs.
