Coup in Germany led by a man calling himself “Henry XIII.” names and refers to aristocratic descent? What sounds ridiculous has a dangerous background.
Thomas Haldenwang did not give the all-clear even after the major raid on alleged “Reich citizens”. “The scene is still very active and dynamic and has again received a lot of new members in the past year,” says the President of the Office for the Protection of the Constitution. The 2021 report for the protection of the constitution, presented in June, had already identified a sharp increase in criminal and violent crimes by “Reich citizens” and “self-governors”. The scene as a whole had also grown, from 20,000 to 21,000 people. 2100 of them are considered violent.
The increase is mainly due to the protests against the Corona measures, according to the report by the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution. Even before the pandemic, Reich citizens rejected state-imposed rules: the core of their ideology is the claim that the Federal Republic has no legal basis, and that in reality the German Reich continues to exist.
It has been clear for years that this worldview is not only bizarre, but also very dangerous. In 2016, a “Reich citizen” shot dead a 32-year-old police officer who was involved with colleagues in a raid in Georgensgmünd, Bavaria. Since then, the scene has been observed by the Office for the Protection of the Constitution, gun licenses from “Reich citizens” are confiscated, at least 1,050 last year, according to a report by the Office for the Protection of the Constitution. However, it also says there that around 500 “Reichsbürger” still had at least one gun license.
“Abyss of Terrorist Threat”
How dangerous the alleged “Reich citizens” were who were arrested by the federal prosecutor’s office this Thursday is apparently not even fully known for the time being. “Only the further investigations will give a clear picture of how far the coup plans had actually progressed,” said Nancy Faeser.
The SPD politician also said that the investigations “allow us to look into the abyss of a terrorist threat from the Reich bourgeois milieu”. This is only contradictory at first glance: the abyss results from the reports from the federal prosecutor’s office. According to this, by the end of November 2021 at the latest, those arrested formed a terrorist organization with the aim of “overcoming the existing state order in Germany and replacing it with our own form of government, which has already been developed in outline”.
The fact that “Heinrich XIII Prince Reuss”, as the group’s presumed ringleader is called, a descendant of the once aristocratic Reuss family, never had a chance to become “regent” of this country does not mean that his plans were harmless. And of course it sounds ridiculous that a former AfD member of the Bundestag should become “Minister of Justice” under Mr. Reuss. But according to the investigators, it was clear to the members of the group that their project “can only be realized through the use of military means and violence against state representatives” – they would have accepted even the deaths.
The conspirators hoped for the “alliance”
According to the Attorney General, individual members of the suspected terror squad had made concrete preparations “to forcibly invade the German Bundestag with a smaller armed group.” The storming of the Capitol in Washington may have served as a model here – at the time, right-wing extremists and fanatical supporters of the ousted US President Donald Trump tried to prevent the confirmation of the election of his successor Joe Biden. There is at least one thing in common between the prevented putschists in Germany and the USA: Some of them refer to the QAnon cult, according to which a “deep state” holds the actual power in their hands. “The detainees cling to conspiracy myths consisting of various narratives of the Reich citizen ideology and the QAnon ideology,” said Attorney General Peter Frank in Karlsruhe in the afternoon.
As with the QAnon cult, the group apparently expected some kind of savior who would destroy the “Deep State”: “Liberation, according to the members of the association, promises the imminent intervention of the ‘Alliance’, a technically superior secret society of governments, intelligence services and the military various states, including the Russian Federation and the United States of America,” said the Attorney General. “The association is firmly convinced that members of the ‘Allianz’ are already in Germany and that their attack on the ‘Deep State’ is imminent.”
“Tag X propaganda can trigger acts of violence”
Bavaria’s Interior Minister Joachim Herrmann warned against not taking the threat posed by “Reich citizens” seriously. The currently exposed group is “obviously one of the largest terrorist organizations that has existed in the more right-wing area in recent years,” said the CSU politician. What some “consider as completely absurd fantasies” leads “for some people to a highly dangerous decision to act”.
The Office for the Protection of the Constitution evaluates the large-scale raid as an important “blow against militant and widely networked parts of the Reich citizen scene,” as President Haldenwang said. “Reich citizens” and “self-administrators” pose an ongoing high risk: “Above all, the propaganda of an impending ‘Day X’ can create considerable pressure to act in such clandestine groups and ultimately trigger serious acts of violence.”
According to the Federal Prosecutor’s Office, there was a political leadership, the “Council”, and a “military arm” within the suspected terrorist organization, which also included former soldiers of the Bundeswehr. According to reports, their boss Rüdiger von P. was once a paratrooper commander. Another member of the group, Michael F., only lost his job as chief inspector in Hanover in April. According to the Military Counterintelligence Service (MAD), which was also involved in the raid, a member of the Special Forces Command was also arrested. Several reservists are being investigated.
Left MP criticizes lack of secrecy
Given the potential threat posed by “Reich citizens,” it seems strange that some of the media found out about the federal prosecutor’s plans long before the raid. “I myself have known about it since the middle of last week, and I also know of several media that have known for two weeks,” said Martina Renner, member of the Bundestag on the left, to ntv.de. “The names of the suspects were known, their address and the planned time of access.”
Interior Minister Faeser did not see any problem in this. “Yes, there was extensive reporting today,” she told journalists in Berlin. “But the Attorney General has it in his hands. And in that respect, I think it’s good and right the way it went today.”
Renner sees things completely differently. “Here there was a risk that an action that had been planned for months would ultimately go wrong.” However, Renner does not see the lack of secrecy as an indication that the authorities rated the potential danger as low. She is concerned with something else: “The past has shown that you have to fear that Reich citizens will defend themselves against being arrested – even with weapons. A total of 3,000 officers were and are currently involved in the raid, not all of them are special forces . Whoever spread the data about this intervention so openly endangered the emergency services.”