German police raids target group accused of
far-right plot to overthrow state
Minor aristocrat, an ex-paratrooper and a former AfD
MP among those detained in operation
Key figures behind alleged plot to overthrow German
government
Kate
Connolly in Berlin and Philip Oltermann
Wed 7 Dec
2022 16.45 GMT
An alleged
far-right plot led by a German aristocrat to overthrow the state that sought
the backing of the Russian government has been thwarted in Germany, after a
series of dawn raids across the country.
Twenty-five
people including a 71-year-old prince, a retired military commander, and an
acting judge and former MP for the far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD)
were planning a violent overthrow of the state, including an armed attack on
the parliament, inspired by the storming of the US Capitol, according to
prosecutors.
The group
was apparently driven in ideology by the deep-state conspiracy theories of
QAnon and the Reichsbürger (“empire citizens”) movement, which denies the right
of modern Germany to exist. It was planning to renegotiate the country’s
post-second world war settlement, insisting the “Deutsche Reich” still had
legitimacy despite having ended with the Nazis’ defeat in 1945.
Nancy
Faeser, Germany’s interior minister, called the group the “enemies of
democracy”, saying it was as yet unclear as to how advanced its plans had been,
or how likely it was to have succeeded.
She said
the government would respond against such plots with the “full force of the
law”, adding: “The investigations provide a glimpse into the abyss of a
terrorist threat from the Reichsbürger milieu.”
Relatives
of the group’s alleged ringleader, Heinrich XIII, Prince Reuß von Greiz, who
claims descent from a royal line that ruled for 800 years in Thuringia until
the breakup of the German monarchy, told the Ostthüringer Zeitung newspaper in
August he was a “bitter old man” with “crazy conspiracy theory views” who had
turned his back on the family years ago. The family said it distanced itself
“very clearly from his political and historical views”.
Peter
Frank, Germany’s public prosecutor general, said the ringleaders of the group
were being held in police custody. He confirmed reports that an armed wing of
the group, which was meant to form the basis of a new German army and included
former active members of the military, had planned to violently storm the
German Bundestag or parliament.
“Those who
have been arrested are supporters of conspiracy myths, from a conglomerate of
narratives relating to the ideologies of the Reichsbürger and QAnon
ideologies,” he told reporters in Karlsruhe.
The German
president, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, told public radio he was “deeply concerned”
by the alleged plot, describing it as a “new level”.
In what is
believed to have been the biggest police investigation in Germany against
extremists, a surveillance team under the auspices of the federal criminal
police office (BKA) and the federal public prosecutor, began monitoring 52
suspects at the start of September under the codename “Shadows”, including
monitoring telephones, chat groups and checking bank accounts. The operation
followed a tip-off from someone in Berlin.
Investigators
say they quickly established strong ideological links between the members, who
included Reichsbürger, as well as members of the coronavirus denial Querdenker
movement and supporters of the QAnon conspiracy theory.
The group,
under the leadership of Heinrich XIII and a former commander of a paratrooper
battalion, had been preparing for so-called “Day X”, on which about two dozen
people were to storm the Reichstag building, home to the German parliament, and
to handcuff and arrest MPs and parliamentary staff in an operation taking as
its example the 2021 attack on the US Capitol.
After their
takeover, the group had envisioned renegotiating the treaties Germany signed
after the end of the second world war. “For now, the Russian Federation was exclusively
to be the central contact for these negotiations,” prosecutors said.
While
Heinrich XIII had made efforts to reach out to Moscow, prosecutors said: “There
is no indication that the contacts reacted positively to his approach.” A
Russian woman named only as Vitalia B, among those arrested on Wednesday, is
suspected of having facilitated those contacts, prosecutors added.
Russia’s
embassy in Berlin denied any Russian state involvement in the group. In a
statement, it said: “Russian diplomatic and consulate offices in Germany have
no contact to representatives of terrorist groups or other illegal units.”
As details
of the group’s members emerged, they revealed what one investigator referred to
as a “motley crew” – from a coronavirus-denying roofer to a gourmet cook, whose
son-in-law is a professional footballer, a pilot with a German airline and a
tenor who was due to be installed as culture minister after the group’s
takeover.
German
politicians expressed their relief that the plot had been thwarted, though Sara
Nanni, of the Greens, said initial indications were that the group might have
lacked the means or wherewithal to carry out their plan.
“More
details keep coming to light that raise doubts about whether these people were
even clever enough to plan and carry out such a coup,” she said in a post on
the social media network Mastadon. However, she acknowledged that “no matter
how crude their ideas and how hopeless their plans”, even the attempt was
dangerous.
Federal
prosecutors said 3,000 officers had conducted searches at 137 sites in 11 of
Germany’s 16 states, including a palace in the state of Thuringia, and that 22
German citizens whad been detained on suspicion of “membership in a terrorist
organisation”. Three other detainees, including a female Russian citizen, -
reportedly Heinrich’s romantic partner – were suspected of supporting the
organisation, they said.
Der Spiegel
reported that locations searched included the barracks of Germany’s special
forces unit, KSK, in the south-western town of Calw. The unit has in the past
been scrutinised over alleged far-right involvement by some soldiers. Federal
prosecutors declined to confirm or deny that the barracks was searched.
But among
those arrested was a former senior field officer at the German army’s
paratrooper battalion, identified as 69-year-old Rüdiger von Pescatore and
believed to have been a commander in Calw. He was also described as a ring
leader of the group.
He and
Heinrich XIII had founded a “terrorist organisation last year with the goal of
overturning the existing state order in Germany”, prosecutors said. The men
planned to replace it with their own form of state, which was “already in the
course of being founded”. Von Pescatore had been in charge of planning the
military coup, and Heinrich XIII with mapping out Germany’s future political
order.
They had
even started to nominate ministers for a transitional post-coup government,
according to the newspaper Die Zeit, in which one of the suspects, the former
AfD MP Birgit Malsack-Winkemann, 58, a judge by profession, who was arrested at
her home in the western Berlin district of Wannsee on Wednesday morning, was to
be federal minister for justice.
Along with
detentions in Germany, prosecutors said one person was detained in the Austrian
ski-resort of Kitzbühel and another in Italy. Italian police confirmed the
arrest around Wednesday lunchtime of a 64-year-old former German army officer
connected to the group. He was detained in a hotel where “material pertaining
to the group’s subversive activity” was found, according to Italian media. The
man was expected to be extradited to Germany soon.
The group
was said to be convinced modern Germany was run by a “deep state” conspiracy
that was about to be exposed by an alliance of German intelligence agencies and
the militaries of foreign states including Russia and the US.
“Everything
will be turned upside down: the current public prosecutors and judges, as well
as the heads of the health departments and their superiors will find themselves
in the dock at Nuremberg 2.0,” one of the suspect said in a message posted on
Telegram minutes before the start of Wednesday’s raids, Die Zeit reported.
While the
suspects believed their aims could be achieved only by military means and with
force, prosecutors said, it was unclear whether the group had managed to amass
any serious kind of arsenal.
Several of
the accused are former members of the military and are suspected of having illegally
taken weapons out of the army’s stock during their years in service, while
others hold arms licences.
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