Soldiers, a right-wing judge and an aristocrat with pretensions to become Germany’s new leader were arrested yesterday on suspicion of plotting to storm the Reichstag and overthrow the German government.
Investigators said last night that at least two dozen armed men and women had planned to force their way into the parliament in Berlin and handcuff MPs and ministers in a violent coup d’état.
The plot, involving members of the Reichsbürger anti-establishment movement and far-right conspiracy theorists influenced by the American QAnon movement, aimed to eliminate the existing state order “by military means”, prosecutors said.
More than 3,000 police launched dawn raids across the country yesterday and arrested 25 suspects. Members of the elite GSG 9 commando unit took part in the operation at 150 homes, offices and storage sites, including a barracks of the KSK special forces command, the equivalent of the SAS.
Those arrested are accused of forming a terrorist group last year led by Heinrich XIII Prinz Reuss, 71, an aristocrat who owns an estate in the eastern state of Thuringia, and a former paratroop commander named only as Rüdiger von P, 69.
The plotters had formed a military and political wing and were trying to recruit soldiers with access to weapons, investigators said. Among those arrested was a serving commando with the KSK, and a former member of parliament for the hard-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party, Birgit Malsack-Winkemann, 58, who is a judge in Berlin.
The suspects, most aged over 40, include a gourmet chef, a roofer who organised anti-Covid policy protests in the Black Forest, a pilot at a commercial German airline and a classical tenor who, it was envisaged, would take over the culture ministry under Heinrich, who saw himself as the new “regent”.
Prosecutors said the group was convinced that its aims could only be realised “by using military means and violence against state representatives. This includes carrying out homicides.” The members signed a confidentiality agreement, with anyone who violated it facing a death penalty. They obtained Iridium satellite phones worth about €20,000 to communicate if the mobile phone network collapsed.
A wealthy female doctor is said to have been in charge of “spiritual issues” and donated €20,000 to help to fund the plot. The group was also in close contact with two psychics responsible for vetting potential recruits.
The prosecutors said that a wider network of up to 52 people was linked to the plot, raising the prospect of further arrests.
“The association has set itself the goal of eliminating the existing state order in Germany, the free democratic basic order,” Peter Frank, the federal prosecutor, told a briefing. “It combines the rejection of the state institutions in Germany with conspiracy myths consisting of various narratives of the Reichsbürger ideology and the QAnon ideology,” he added, referring to the American conspiracy theory that inspired the riot at the US Capitol on January 6 last year.
Frank said the group of plotters had a political and a military arm, including former soldiers. The political wing called itself “the council”. Prinz Reuss, an independent financial adviser based in Frankfurt, held meetings for the plotters at his estate in Thuringia, outlining an administration that would feature Malsack-Winkemann as justice minister.
Prinz Reuss is estranged from the House of Reuss, which ruled parts of Germany for hundreds of years. In August a spokesman for the family described him as an old man subject to “conspiracy-theory misconceptions”.
Frank said the group’s military arm hoped “to build up a new German army and consists of homeland security units, which have yet to be formed”.
Some Reichsbürger members have declared mini-kingdoms and issued their own passports. They were dismissed as cranks until 2016 when members were involved in a gunfight with police and one officer was killed. They have been targeted in a general crackdown on the far right in Germany in recent years after being tied to racist killings and terrorist attacks. They are believed to have links with QAnon.
The arrest of Malsack-Winkemann has fuelled concern about the role of the AfD in far-right and conspiracy theory movements. The prosecutor’s office said: “The suspects are united by a deep rejection of the state institutions and the free democratic basic order of the Federal Republic of Germany, which over time has led to their decision to participate in their violent elimination and to engage in concrete acts of preparation for this.
“They are firmly convinced that Germany is being ruled by members of a ‘deep state’. Liberation is promised by the imminent intervention of the ‘Alliance’, a technically superior secret alliance of governments, intelligence services and militaries of various states, including the Russian Federation as well as the United States of America.”
Peter Neumann, a terrorism expert, said the plotters believed that about a hundred people were enough to carry out a coup d’état in Germany. “That is, of course, a delusion,” he said. “But it would have been capable of carrying out terrorist attacks. People would probably have died in the process.”
Nancy Faeser, the interior minister, said: “Further investigation will give a picture of how far the plans for a coup had progressed.”
Germany’s extreme right, never particularly noted for its sanity or coherence, has become an increasingly deranged gumbo of conspiracy theories and state-smashing fantasies, stretching from imperial nostalgists and QAnon disciples to antivaxers and neo-Nazis (Oliver Moody writes).
Today’s dawn arrests provide a fascinating cross-section of fringe groups united only by their loathing of modern liberal democracy and readiness to use any means to overturn it.
The pressure has been building for years. Since the 2015 migration crisis German police have uncovered bizarre plots to try to bring the constitutional order crashing down through a civil war, often referred to as “Day X”.
One army lieutenant led a double life as a fake refugee from Syria with the intention of assassinating ministers and unleashing public fury against immigrants.
That investigation led to the discovery of the Hannibal network, a tangle of interlinked far-right chat groups, in which dozens of serving police officers, soldiers, security officials and even judges discussed their plans for the impending collapse of the German social order.
What has changed over the past three years is that the pandemic restrictions have loosely soldered together an inchoate mass of resentment that these groups hope to mobilise into an uprising, fanned by the right-wing populists of the Alternative for Germany (AfD) party.
In August 2020 a lockdown protest in Berlin boiled over into an attempt to seize the Reichstag building, as 300 to 400 demonstrators broke through the barricades, aided and abetted from within parliament by a handful of AfD MPs.
This year Germany’s security agencies have been warning of a “hot winter” in which various extremist factions would compete to channel public anger into an assault on the state itself.
The latest alleged conspiracy to occupy the Reichstag is remarkable for its breadth. Its ringleader is alleged to be a Thuringian aristocrat who styles himself as Heinrich XIII, Prince Reuss, a distant scion of the dynasty that once ruled one of the micro-states folded into the German empire in 1871.
A property investor based in Frankfurt, who has been linked to a British asset management company, Heinrich is alleged to have been known to police as a prominent figure in the Reichsbürger (Reich Citizens) movement, whose estimated 20,000 members believe the postwar German republic is constitutionally illegitimate.
The plotters are said to have planned to install Heinrich at the head of a military transitional government to head off a rival coup by the “Alliance”, a supposed secret society of “Deep State” officials colluding to subjugate Germany in concert with foreign powers such as Russia and the United States.
Yet the Reich Citizens were not acting alone. Heinrich’s alleged co-conspirators include the Berlin judge and former AfD MP Birgit Malsack-Winkemann, 58, who is claimed to have been earmarked as his justice minister, tasked with securing the loyalty of the German judiciary.
There were also a number of raids on addresses associated with present and former soldiers in the German armed forces, 1,242 of whose members were under investigation by military counter-intelligence last year for suspected right-wing extremist tendencies. Another 92 were suspected of sympathising with the Reich Citizens.
One of the figures allegedly embroiled in the Reichstag conspiracy is a serving member of the KSK, the troubled elite special forces unit, at least 20 of whose soldiers have been found to be tangled up in far-right groups.
In all, Germany’s domestic intelligence agency, the BfV, estimates that there are now about 13,500 right-wing extremists prepared to use violence to achieve their objectives. It seems almost certain that this will not be the last coup plot of its kind.
