“Harus” calls for “peace” demo: why that’s problematic

Saturday, March 11, 2023, at the Bundesplatz in Bern. 2,000 to 3,000 people gather under the label “peace demonstration”. They call for the lifting of sanctions against Russia, a return to Switzerland’s absolute neutrality and “negotiations instead of tanks and diplomacy instead of sanctions”.

The association ‘Moderate’ had called for the demonstration. Among other things, the so-called freedom fighters had come. A short video recording shows their march to the Bundesplatz and also members of the group singing slogans in unison. The whole thing ends – albeit much less polyphonically – with the cry “Harus!”. It is not clear from the video recordings who puts him in the mood.

With “Harus!” hailed the local fascist, anti-Semitic and National Socialist organizations in Switzerland in the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s.

The so-called frontists had quite a few followers in Switzerland at the time. In several cantons they were even elected to the canton government. The inglorious highlight was the substitute election for the Council of States in 1933 in the canton of Schaffhausen, when the candidate for the National Front, party founder Rolf Henne, received 27 percent of the vote. The then ‘leader’ of the National Front, the Zurich lawyer Robert Tobler, was even a member of the National Council from 1935 to 1939.

Just like the German model, the NSDAP, the Front National in Switzerland, also had paramilitary cells, the so-called “Harste”. They carried out bombings and planned a coup d’état in 1934, including “transporting and disarming” political opponents.

After a ban by the Bundesrat in 1940, the fragmented Swiss front groups, which received little support from Nazi Germany, disappeared again. With that, the exclamation “Harus!” – until the far-right PNOS (Nationally Oriented Swiss Party) took it out of the mothballs and named its party newspaper after it. Since then he has haunted the Swiss neo-Nazi scene again.

For patriot.ch, this is no reason to stigmatize the phrase. The website, which pursues the goal of «the left-wing media monopoly and [sic] To break through propaganda,” explains a 2018 contribution: “In times when the awareness of one’s own nation was growing throughout Europe – and therefore also in Switzerland (18th – 19th century), the Swiss in particular took advantage of it. Poets and writers use the expression ‘Harus’.”

Reference is made, among other things, to a poem by the Swiss journalist Jakob Schaffner. That Schaffner was a Nazi admirer and wrote for the Nazi newspaper “Das Reich” is concealed by patriot.ch – but the website does not really want to disguise the association of the phrase with Swiss Nazis: “All in all, Harus developed in the unmistakably Swiss terminology, so that Harus was subsequently adopted as the official salute by the National Front.” And at the beginning of the article it is not without pride: “Adopted by our ancestors, the Swiss battle cry has recently experienced a true renaissance. Wherever the homelanders congregate, you hear the powerful reverberation.”

According to research by Blick, patriot.ch and freiheitstrychler.ch are owned by IT entrepreneur Markus Hilfiker. Hilfiker is considered a close confidant and right-hand man of Freedom Trychler founder Andy Benz.