December 16, 2020

By Thomas Klikauer

One hundred years after the failed Kapp Putsch in 1920 and Hitler’s failed Beer Hall Putsch of 1923, Germany’s fascistic right wing is still trying to replace a democratically elected government with an authoritarian system. Hitler learned his lesson: The way to power was not via a Putsch but via Germany’s conservatives – Papen (conservative), Hindenburg (military), Hugenberg (media).

In December 2022 today’s German reactionaries attempted to organize a putsch, or a coup d'état, the seizure and removal of a democratically elected government.

This time it was the so-called Reichsbürger – a right-wing extremist group somewhat similar to QAnon. Although the Covid-19 pandemic and its related conspiracy fantasies are finally on the decline, a deeply subversive, right-wing extremist, reactionary group called the Reichsbürger is still in existence in Germany.

Its membership ranges from the German army – the Bundeswehr – to the AfD (Alternative für Deutschland) and to Germany’s aristocrats, left over from not having a French Revolution. Reichsbürger believe in the most insane fantasies. And they were in the process of organizing a coup in Germany. The state’s action stopped them in time, though investigations are ongoing.

The German federal prosecutor’s office accused the right-wing Reichsbürger of planning a putsch and sent 3,000 police officers and the special anti-terror unit called GSG9 to storm their houses and hideouts. The federal government took the matter very seriously. Even if there were no immediate concrete plans for a coup d'etat, the Reichsbürger network posed a danger.

One of its members recently killed a gas station attendant in the semi-rural town of Idar Oberstein because he was asked to wear a face mask. Reichsbürger have also shot German police officers in recent years.

It would be a very serious mistake to see the Reichsbürger as a marginal group. In the state’s move on December 7 against the Reichsbürger putsch, members of the group were found to include a prince, an ex-deputy of a political party elected to Germany’s federal parliament, a popular singer, an airline pilot, a medical doctor and – most importantly – armed and trained soldiers and policemen. The group got together in a kind of political delirium to hallucinate about the overthrow Germany’s government.

On December 7, about 3,000 police personnel searched more than 130 houses, apartments, and offices of the Reichsbürger. 51 Reichsbürger were formally charged, and for 25 more arrest warrants were issued. German police units – including GSG9 special forces – were deployed nationwide.

The group of Reichsbürger – supported by ex-military people – had prepared for a so-called Day X. Perhaps inspired by Trump’s henchmen storming the Capitol on January 6, 2021, the Reichsbürger plan was to storm Germany’s Reichstag (parliament) and seize power.

A man known as Heinrich XIII or Prince Reuß, who comes from an old aristocratic family, has been central to the Reichsbürger plans. He is one of two ringleaders among those arrested in 11 German states.

These Reichsbürger aren’t new. They pre-date the Covid-19 pandemic. But the most recent plot for a coup d'état indicates increased commitment, above all right-wing radicalization, and a willingness to use violence.

The coup d'état plotters wanted to kidnap Germany’s health minister – a professor of medicine, Karl Lauterbach – who, in the conspiracy fantasies of the Reichsbürger and anti-vaxxers, masterminded the Covid-19 restrictions in Germany.

The Reichsbürger include Telegram groups related to the so-called Citizens of the Reich, the German empire. They show an interest in conspiracy fantasies that suggest Covid-19 and vaccines are part of sinister plots to control the people.

Reichsbürger also spread disinformation about Russia’s war in Ukraine. Ultimately, German Reichsbürger thrive on a wide range of right-wing conspiracy beliefs that push the idea that evil cabals control our lives. Reichsbürger also believe that they have to protect us from them – there is always the illusive and never-specified “them”.

The entire setup might sound like a pretty weird plot to the average person, but the sheer violence of the Reichsbürger is mind-numbing. Their ideology is sheer madness – but they take action, and killings take place in the real world.

An estimated 50 men and women are in the inner circle of the Reichsbürger plotters. They were set not just to overthrow Germany’s democracy, but also to replace it with a new state modeled on the Uber-authoritarian German Reich of 1871, also known as the Second Reich. It is different from Hitler’s hallucination of a Third Reich.

Technically, the Reichsbürger do not want to return to the Nazis’ Third Reich, but they want to go back even earlier to the Prussian Reich – a kind of German authoritarianism without the Holocaust but with anti-Semitism. In any case, all of this does not mean that among the Reichsbürger there are no neo-Nazis – to the contrary.

The Reichsbürger coup d'état plotters had a hierarchical organization called the council and, most importantly, a military arm. To stop their putsch, the federal and state police raided their homes and offices in one of the biggest anti-right-wing extremist operations in post-Nazi Germany. The 3,000 police officers carried out 150 operations in 11 of Germany’s 16 states – with two people also arrested in Austria and Italy.

Almost half of arrests took place in the two southern states of Baden-Württemberg and Bavaria. The raids peered into the abyss of Germany’s prime right-wing terrorist threat coming from the Reichsbürger. These so-called “citizens of the Reich” follow an extreme reactionary ideology. Reichsbürger reject Germany’s modern democratic institutions. Because they also reject the modern state, Reichsbürger refuse to pay taxes, for example.

Last year, there were about 21,000 Reichsbürger in Germany – with a substantial growth during the years of the Covid-19 pandemic. Roughly 10% – 2,100 – have been identified as violent. With detailed post-putsch plans to rule Germany, Reichsbürger had already been designated to run the ministries such as health, justice, and foreign affairs after the coup d'état.

The Reichsbürger thought they could realize their goals through military means and violence against state representatives. Such goals usually involve mass shootings and death squads to carry out killings. They wanted to create civil war conditions, bringing an end to Germany’s democracy.

Not entirely unsurprising, a former right-wing extremist AfD member of Germany’s federal parliament –Birgit Malsack-Winkemann – was among the people arrested. One can safely say that Germany’s right-wing extremist AfD – some say neo-Nazis – is ideologically close to the Reichsbürger who, most likely, voted for the AfD in past elections.

Yet the Reichsbürger top dog isn’t Birgit Malsack-Winkemann, but a lawyer – set to handle foreign affairs after the coup d'état – Heinrich XIII. He is the Reichsbürger Führer, or leader. Besides the rather carnivalistic connotations, Heinrich XIII likes to style himself as The Prince. After all, he comes from an old aristocratic family known as the House of Reuss.

Based on their feudalistic blood-and-soil-based latifundia, they ruled over parts of what is today the eastern state of Thuringia until 1918, when the revolution ended their medieval wet dreams of ruling over local peasants. Having only had a failed revolution in 1918/19, the descendants of the Reichsbürger Führer Prinz Reuss still own a few castles.

Prince Heinrich himself is said to have a hunting lodge at Bad Lobenstein, in the former East German state of Thuringia. The rest of his family has distanced themselves from the aristocrats. One of Prince Heinrich’s relatives claims that Heinrich was at times confused and had fallen for misconceptions fueled by conspiracy theories.

Heinrich’s Reichsbürger had many plans for a post-putsch government. These included the elimination of all democratic bodies, even down to local levels. To achieve that, the Reichsbürger were trying to recruit police officers while keeping an eye on army barracks to recruit soldiers.

This was successful. One of the plotters was a member of a special commando force of Germany’s army. The police searched his home and his room at the Graf-Zeppelin military base in Calw, located just southwest of the city of Stuttgart.

Another suspect has been identified as a Russian woman who was asked to approach Putin on behalf of Prinz Heinrich. Meanwhile, the Russian embassy in Berlin said it did not maintain contacts with representatives of terrorist groups and other illegal entities – naturally.

Among the ideologies of the Putin-loving Reichsbürger, including their Führer, the Prince, is the hallucination that today’s Federal Republic of Germany is an illegitimate state. Accordingly, Germany is still at war with the Allies.

Not all Reichsbürger refer to the same Reich. Some of them claim that the constitution of the Weimar Republic (1919-1933) is still valid. Others refer to Hitler’s Third Reich, and still others feel that they belong to German Empire of 1871.

Common to all, though, is the idea of restoring the sovereignty of the German Empire. Some, however, hold the hallucination of their own mini-Reich – their own sovereign territory. They even “founded” mini-states with their own passports and drivers’ licenses, taxes, etc.

Since the end of Nazism, the downfall of their beloved German Empire, German far-right groups and political parties have been trying to restore it. This is the ideological origin of the Reichsbürger. The historical origin dates back to the 1980s, when right-wing extremist Wolfgang Gerhard Günter Ebel cooked up an imperial ideology that legitimized the Reichsbürger.

Ebel claimed to have received an order from the Allies to temporarily take over the leadership of the still- existing German Empire. He founded the so-called Provisional Government of the Reich. His followers and today’s Reichsbürger are composed of right-wing, older, single, white men. Yet, many women also believe that the German Reich still exists. Some of them even hold central positions within the Reichsbürger.

Sociologically, Reichsbürger are very hard to define. There is a lot of overlap between the milieux they come from. Many Reichsbürger are active in the New Age field of esotericism. This made them attractive to the Covid-19 anti-vaxxers, for example. Much of this contributed to the engineering of the planned coup d'état and the subsequent raids against the Reichsbürger conducted in early December 2022.

After one hundred years, Germany’s violent right-wing extremists are still planning a coup d'état against the democratically elected government. Nevertheless, Germany has learned from the past.

2022 is not 1922. Today, the German state has refined its instruments to detect right-wing extremists. Today, the state is capable of preventing the planned storming of Germany’s parliament to replace democracy with authoritarianism.

Thomas Klikauer is the author of Alternative für Deutschland – The AfD – Germany’s New Nazis or Another Populist Party?

 

One hundred years after the failed Kapp Putsch in 1920 and Hitler’s failed Beer Hall Putsch of 1923, Germany’s fascistic right wing is still trying to replace a democratically elected government with an authoritarian system. Hitler learned his lesson: The way to power was not via a Putsch but via Germany’s conservatives – Papen (conservative), Hindenburg (military), Hugenberg (media).

In December 2022 today’s German reactionaries attempted to organize a putsch, or a coup d'état, the seizure and removal of a democratically elected government.

This time it was the so-called Reichsbürger – a right-wing extremist group somewhat similar to QAnon. Although the Covid-19 pandemic and its related conspiracy fantasies are finally on the decline, a deeply subversive, right-wing extremist, reactionary group called the Reichsbürger is still in existence in Germany.

Its membership ranges from the German army – the Bundeswehr – to the AfD (Alternative für Deutschland) and to Germany’s aristocrats, left over from not having a French Revolution. Reichsbürger believe in the most insane fantasies. And they were in the process of organizing a coup in Germany. The state’s action stopped them in time, though investigations are ongoing.

The German federal prosecutor’s office accused the right-wing Reichsbürger of planning a putsch and sent 3,000 police officers and the special anti-terror unit called GSG9 to storm their houses and hideouts. The federal government took the matter very seriously. Even if there were no immediate concrete plans for a coup d'etat, the Reichsbürger network posed a danger.

One of its members recently killed a gas station attendant in the semi-rural town of Idar Oberstein because he was asked to wear a face mask. Reichsbürger have also shot German police officers in recent years.

It would be a very serious mistake to see the Reichsbürger as a marginal group. In the state’s move on December 7 against the Reichsbürger putsch, members of the group were found to include a prince, an ex-deputy of a political party elected to Germany’s federal parliament, a popular singer, an airline pilot, a medical doctor and – most importantly – armed and trained soldiers and policemen. The group got together in a kind of political delirium to hallucinate about the overthrow Germany’s government.

On December 7, about 3,000 police personnel searched more than 130 houses, apartments, and offices of the Reichsbürger. 51 Reichsbürger were formally charged, and for 25 more arrest warrants were issued. German police units – including GSG9 special forces – were deployed nationwide.

The group of Reichsbürger – supported by ex-military people – had prepared for a so-called Day X. Perhaps inspired by Trump’s henchmen storming the Capitol on  January 6, 2021, the Reichsbürger plan was to storm Germany’s Reichstag (parliament) and seize power.

A man known as Heinrich XIII or Prince Reuß, who comes from an old aristocratic family, has been central to the Reichsbürger plans. He is one of two ringleaders among those arrested in 11 German states.

These Reichsbürger aren’t new. They pre-date the Covid-19 pandemic. But the most recent plot for a coup d'état indicates increased commitment, above all right-wing radicalization, and a willingness to use violence.

The coup d'état plotters wanted to kidnap Germany’s health minister – a professor of medicine, Karl Lauterbach – who, in the conspiracy fantasies of the Reichsbürger and anti-vaxxers, masterminded the Covid-19 restrictions in Germany.

The Reichsbürger include Telegram groups related to the so-called Citizens of the Reich, the German empire. They show an interest in conspiracy fantasies that suggest Covid-19 and vaccines are part of sinister plots to control the people.

Reichsbürger also spread disinformation about Russia’s war in Ukraine. Ultimately, German Reichsbürger thrive on a wide range of right-wing conspiracy beliefs that push the idea that evil cabals control our lives. Reichsbürger also believe that they have to protect us from them – there is always the illusive and never-specified “them”.

The entire setup might sound like a pretty weird plot to the average person, but the sheer violence of the Reichsbürger is mind-numbing. Their ideology is sheer madness – but they take action, and killings take place in the real world.

An estimated 50 men and women are in the inner circle of the Reichsbürger plotters. They were set not just to overthrow Germany’s democracy, but also to replace it with a new state modeled on the Uber-authoritarian German Reich of 1871, also known as the Second Reich. It is different from Hitler’s hallucination of a Third Reich.

Technically, the Reichsbürger do not want to return to the Nazis’ Third Reich, but they want to go back even earlier to the Prussian Reich – a kind of German authoritarianism without the Holocaust but with anti-Semitism. In any case, all of this does not mean that among the Reichsbürger there are no neo-Nazis – to the contrary.

The Reichsbürger coup d'état plotters had a hierarchical organization called the council and, most importantly, a military arm. To stop their putsch, the federal and state police raided their homes and offices in one of the biggest anti-right-wing extremist operations in post-Nazi Germany. The 3,000 police officers carried out 150 operations in 11 of Germany’s 16 states – with two people also arrested in Austria and Italy.

Almost half of arrests took place in the two southern states of Baden-Württemberg and Bavaria. The raids peered into the abyss of Germany’s prime right-wing terrorist threat coming from the Reichsbürger. These so-called “citizens of the Reich” follow an extreme reactionary ideology. Reichsbürger reject Germany’s modern democratic institutions. Because they also reject the modern state, Reichsbürger refuse to pay taxes, for example.

Last year, there were about 21,000 Reichsbürger in Germany – with a substantial growth during the years of the Covid-19 pandemic. Roughly 10% – 2,100 – have been identified as violent. With detailed post-putsch plans to rule Germany, Reichsbürger had already been designated to run the ministries such as health, justice, and foreign affairs after the coup d'état.

The Reichsbürger thought they could realize their goals through military means and violence against state representatives. Such goals usually involve mass shootings and death squads to carry out killings. They wanted to create civil war conditions, bringing an end to Germany’s democracy.

Not entirely unsurprising, a former right-wing extremist AfD member of Germany’s federal parliament –Birgit Malsack-Winkemann – was among the people arrested. One can safely say that Germany’s right-wing extremist AfD – some say neo-Nazis – is ideologically close to the Reichsbürger who, most likely, voted for the AfD in past elections.

Yet the Reichsbürger top dog isn’t Birgit Malsack-Winkemann, but a lawyer – set to handle foreign affairs after the coup d'état – Heinrich XIII. He is the Reichsbürger Führer, or leader. Besides the rather carnivalistic connotations, Heinrich XIII likes to style himself as The Prince. After all, he comes from an old aristocratic family known as the House of Reuss.

Based on their feudalistic blood-and-soil-based latifundia, they ruled over parts of what is today the eastern state of Thuringia until 1918, when the revolution ended their medieval wet dreams of ruling over local peasants. Having only had a failed revolution in 1918/19, the descendants of the Reichsbürger Führer Prinz Reuss still own a few castles.

Prince Heinrich himself is said to have a hunting lodge at Bad Lobenstein, in the former East German state of Thuringia. The rest of his family has distanced themselves from the aristocrats. One of Prince Heinrich’s relatives claims that Heinrich was at times confused and had fallen for misconceptions fueled by conspiracy theories.

Heinrich’s Reichsbürger had many plans for a post-putsch government. These included the elimination of all democratic bodies, even down to local levels. To achieve that, the Reichsbürger were trying to recruit police officers while keeping an eye on army barracks to recruit soldiers.

This was successful. One of the plotters was a member of a special commando force of Germany’s army. The police searched his home and his room at the Graf-Zeppelin military base in Calw, located just southwest of the city of Stuttgart.

Another suspect has been identified as a Russian woman who was asked to approach Putin on behalf of Prinz Heinrich. Meanwhile, the Russian embassy in Berlin said it did not maintain contacts with representatives of terrorist groups and other illegal entities – naturally.

Among the ideologies of the Putin-loving Reichsbürger, including their Führer, the Prince, is the hallucination that today’s Federal Republic of Germany is an illegitimate state. Accordingly, Germany is still at war with the Allies.

Not all Reichsbürger refer to the same Reich. Some of them claim that the constitution of the Weimar Republic (1919-1933) is still valid. Others refer to Hitler’s Third Reich, and still others feel that they belong to German Empire of 1871.

Common to all, though, is the idea of restoring the sovereignty of the German Empire. Some, however, hold the hallucination of their own mini-Reich – their own sovereign territory. They even “founded” mini-states with their own passports and drivers’ licenses, taxes, etc.

Since the end of Nazism, the downfall of their beloved German Empire, German far-right groups and political parties have been trying to restore it. This is the ideological origin of the Reichsbürger. The historical origin dates back to the 1980s, when right-wing extremist Wolfgang Gerhard Günter Ebel cooked up an imperial ideology that legitimized the Reichsbürger.

Ebel claimed to have received an order from the Allies to temporarily take over the leadership of the still- existing German Empire. He founded the so-called Provisional Government of the Reich. His followers and today’s Reichsbürger are composed of right-wing, older, single, white men. Yet, many women also believe that the German Reich still exists. Some of them even hold central positions within the Reichsbürger.

Sociologically, Reichsbürger are very hard to define. There is a lot of overlap between the milieux they come from. Many Reichsbürger are active in the New Age field of esotericism. This made them attractive to the Covid-19 anti-vaxxers, for example. Much of this contributed to the engineering of the planned coup d'état and the subsequent raids against the Reichsbürger conducted in early December 2022.

After one hundred years, Germany’s violent right-wing extremists are still planning a coup d'état against the democratically elected government. Nevertheless, Germany has learned from the past.

2022 is not 1922. Today, the German state has refined its instruments to detect right-wing extremists. Today, the state is capable of preventing the planned storming of Germany’s parliament to replace democracy with authoritarianism.

 

Thomas Klikauer is the author of Alternative für Deutschland – The AfD – Germany’s New Nazis or Another Populist Party?