Named strangeness around the thwarted conspiracy of the “Reichsburgers” in Germany

The British edition of The Observer begins its story of the Reichsburger conspiracy with the words of a man calling himself “General Eder”: new judicial and political order. Change is inevitable – and this is a matter of a few weeks. “If everything goes according to plan, we’ll make it before Christmas.”

The words came from a video uploaded recently to a site popular among far-right conspiracy theorists.

Ten days later, early on Wednesday morning, Maximilian Eder, 64, was arrested in the Italian city of Perugia in the largest series of raids against right-wing extremism in German history. Together with 25 accomplices, Eder is accused of hatching a plan to overthrow the German state by violent means, establishing a shadow government headed by a petty German aristocrat.

Although none of the conspirators were prominent public figures, their social origins are surprising: they included family doctors, judges, gourmet cooks, and opera singers.

A civil servant of the Lower Saxony Criminal Police Department is also under investigation for links to the group, ZDF reported.

The circle of conspirators, notes The Observer, was supplemented by people with a military background, such as Eder: the real commander of one of the armored battalions of the Bundeswehr from 1998 to 2000, who spent time serving in Kosovo and Afghanistan and was one of the founders of the command of the forces special purpose of Germany (KSK). The former commander of the 251st airborne assault battalion was named as the alleged leader of the “combat unit” of the group.

But the inclusion of a former member of the Bundestag from the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) on the list of conspirators was the most alarming signal: as a former member, Birgit Malsack-Winkemann should have known the security measures and had special privileges of access to the parliament building complex in the center of Berlin.

A list of potential Reichsburger targets seized from the suspect’s home during police raids reportedly included seven members of the German Bundestag, including Greens foreign minister Annalena Burbock, conservative opposition leader Friedrich Merz, and co-chairman and general secretary of the Social Democratic parts of Saskia Esken and Kevin Kuhnert.

German Federal President Frank-Walter Steinmeier said he was “deeply concerned” by the alleged plot, describing it as “a new level”.

However, the question arose as to whether the group of conspirators really posed a serious threat to the democratic order of Germany or were they just a bunch of cranks with an overactive imagination, notes The Observer.

The fact that select newspapers and film crews were informed of the dawn raids in advance – as early as two weeks ago, left-wing MP Martina Renner said – led to criticism that the operation was intended as a PR for the security services.

The conservative Swiss daily Neue Zürcher Zeitung observes that “the German security services wanted to flex their muscles in front of the whole world”; and the Berliner Zeitung reported that the arrests were seen as a “well-planned PR stunt” aimed at no more than “25 decrepit lunatics”.

Others have suggested that the fact that the raids were carried out the day before Germany’s nationwide “alert day” meant to test warning systems and inform people about emergency scenarios must be more than a coincidence.

Within hours of the arrest, newspapers including Spiegel and Die Zeit published detailed articles outlining the conspirators’ colorful past, which were soon picked up around the world and guaranteed international attention.

One question is whether the media strategy could have undermined the true intent of the operation to collect evidence to bring the conspirators to justice. The Berlin newspaper Tagesspiegel published an interview with Eder’s neighbor from his hometown of Eppenschlag in Bavaria, who said that a few days ago a pensioner called her from Croatia. “Perhaps the police will come next week,” the former military man said.

The retired military leader has been on the radar of intelligence agencies since at least the summer of 2021, when he joined German anti-vaccination marches in uniform and promised to protect protesters from the police. After the catastrophic flash floods in western Germany, Eder and his supporters set up a “crisis committee” in August of that year at a school in devastated Ahrweiler.

Another question is whether the suppression of the Eder conspirators was justified by the threat they posed to national security. His video message, in which he openly shares his revolutionary plan with the rest of the world, may allude not so much to genius strategists plotting in the shadows, but to old men stuck in the echo chamber of the Internet, The Observer notes.

But on the other hand, the corner of the right-wing extremist spectrum in which Eder and his entourage live has flourished in recent years precisely because it has not been taken seriously enough.

Prosecutors on Wednesday called the arrested suspects “supporters of conspiracy myths from a conglomeration of narratives concerning the ideology of the Reichsburgers and the ideology of QAnon.” The beliefs of the first group, the “citizens of the Reich,” are detailed in a speech at a Swiss business forum in 2019 by Prince Henry XIII, a 71-year-old aristocrat who is described as the political leader of the group and who presented himself as the ruler of the state after the coup, at least temporarily. basis.

Complaining that his dynasty had been unjustly dispossessed as a result of wars unleashed by sinister Freemasons and Jewish financiers, Henry XIII argued that modern Germany had “become a mere administrative structure of the Allies” – a standard image of the Reichsburg movement.

Rejecting the international treaty that allowed German reunification in the early 1990s, its supporters argue that the Reich has continued to exist since Germany signed an armistice, not a post-World War II peace treaty. According to the views of the “Reichsburgers”, the FRG is illegitimate, being just a “simulation of the state.” Which empire to restore, the Reichsburger cannot always agree.

“The Reichsburger scene is very internally divided, and Henry XIII was not a particularly dominant figure in the movement as a whole,” comments analyst Nicholas Potter, who tracks far-right networks for the Amadeu Antonio Foundation, which campaigns against racism and anti-Semitism. “Some of them want the Kaiserreich back [императорское немецкое государство между 1871-м и 1918 годами]others – Third Reich [Гитлеровскую Германию]”, – he said.

Henry XIII demonstrated the internal division of the movement in a letter dated June 9, 2020, which was later published on a German channel. In his article, he warns that Germany, led by Georg Friedrich, Prince of Prussia, current head of the Prussian branch of the House of Hohenzollern that ruled the German Empire, will be “a monarchy at the mercy of the Allies” – a “federative republic 2.0”. Henry XIII, in contrast, promised to adhere to the “correct structure in accordance with international law” by re-creating the member state of the Kaiserreich.

He envisioned the new Reich as a thin state with “a parliament of a maximum of 201 delegates and five ministries,” writes The Observer. The voting law was supposed to be reformed. In a letter, a frustrated Henry XIII complained that his plan required the support not only of three allies (“USA, Russia, Great Britain”), but also of patriot armies, “which, unfortunately, are not easy to consolidate.”

Such bombastic fantasies, coupled with legal attacks, used to make it easy to ignore the “Reichsburgers”, notes The Observer. Even after one of the supporters of the fringe movement shot and killed a police officer during a raid in the Franconia region in 2016, the BfV (Germany’s internal intelligence service) refused to take steps to systematically monitor the movement. Although the conspiracy theory had several hundred supporters, not all of them could be classified as right-wing extremists, the BfV said at the time.

The intelligence agency only began taking the movement more seriously in the year of the departure of its president, Hans-Georg Maassen, who has since spread conspiracy theories about the pandemic and the World Economic Forum on social media. That year the agency counted 19,000 Reichsburghers throughout Germany, and since then the number has grown to 21,000.

“The Reichsburghers existed before the pandemic, but during the protests against quarantine measures and vaccines, they found a lot of open ears,” says Nicholas Potter. “What we are seeing now is a meeting of many different minds.”

It is alarming that one of the few unifying features of the movement is a tendency to stockpile weapons and ammunition. German police found weapons in 50 of the 150 sites they searched during the raids, including two rifles, one pistol, swords and crossbows: this arsenal is not enough to stage a coup in a country of 83 million, but enough to carry out a targeted terrorist attack , notes The Observer.

It remains unclear whether the group hid additional weapons elsewhere. In May 2020, a member of the German Special Forces Command was found to have seized weapons and ammunition from army reserves and stashed them in a secret location, apparently in preparation for a “X-Day” social collapse scenario.

Peter Neumann, a terrorism expert and professor of security studies at King’s College London, compared last week’s jokes about senile tweed dreamers to early British media coverage of Abu Hamza, the former imam of London’s Finsbury Park mosque. “Hamza was portrayed as a ridiculous clown with a crochet hook and an eyepatch, and for years even the security authorities didn’t take him seriously,” Neumann said. “Only later did we learn that he was instrumental in drawing hundreds of people into terrorist networks.”

Germany’s latest domestic intelligence report puts the potential number of Reichsburghers at 2,100, comparable to the 1,950 individuals in the country who were listed last year as potential supporters of Islamist terrorist violence. Although the “citizens of the empire” were generally less organized than ISIS supporters (terrorist organization banned in Russia. – “MK”), according to Neumann, they were also more likely to have access to weapons.

“I don’t believe for a second that this group would have succeeded in overthrowing the government,” the expert added. “The big question is how much damage they could have done by trying to do that.”