The prince, the plotters and the would-be putsch:
Germany to try far-right coup gang
Ex-soldier, conspiracy theorist, astrologer and
anti-vaxxer among the first of 27 people on trial for trying to violently
topple the German government – led by Heinrich XIII Prince Reuss
Kate
Connolly in Berlin
Sat 27 Apr
2024 13.00 BST
One of the
largest legal proceedings in German history is due to start on Monday with the
first of three trials of a group of far-right conspiracists who planned to
violently overthrow the country’s parliament.
So
sprawling is the network, so extensive their plans, that for a mixture of
logistical and security reasons, the 27 people due in the dock have been split
into three separate groups.
On Monday a
group of nine, identified as the “military wing” behind the group ringleader,
the self-proclaimed Heinrich XIII, Prince Reuss, 72, will be the first to go on
trial in the southern city of Stuttgart on terrorism charges. Nine others,
including Reuss and other prominent members, go on trial in Frankfurt on 21
May.
Prince
Reuss, an antisemitic businessman, descended from a formerly aristocratic
family, founded the group with the express wish to violently eliminate the
state order. In the event of the coup’s success, he was due to be declared
provisional head of a new German state, which would have redrawn the country
according to its 1937 borders.
According
to federal prosecutors, the group planned to enter the Reichstag in Berlin with
armed support to arrest members of the Bundestag or parliament with the
intention of “overthrowing the system”. The plotters aimed to forcibly
eliminate the existing state order and replace it with their own government.
They had been forging the plans from August 2021, until they were uncovered in
December 2022 in a series of large scale anti-terror raids involving thousands
of officers searching 150 properties across 11 German states, as well as
abroad.
Members,
many connected to the German far-right extremist Reichsbürger movement, had
access “to a massive arsenal of weapons”, prosecutors said, including 380
firearms, 350 cutting and stabbing weapons, almost 500 other weapons and
148,000 pieces of ammunition, which they referred to by the codename “bonbons”.
“These are
people who do not recognise the federal republic and its democratic
structures,” the prosecutors said.
Among their
very detailed plans was an “execution list” drawn up by an ex-elite soldier and
survival trainer, Peter Wörner, nicknamed “Wolf”, which included chancellor
Olaf Scholz, two leading TV personalities, Markus Lanz and Sandra Maischberger,
as well as the head of the opposition CDU, Friedrich Merz. In preparation for
the new “regime”, in which he expected to have a part, Wörner had commissioned
a tailor to run him up a “Nazi-style” soldier’s uniform, the court will hear.
The
would-be putchists paid a Swiss criminal gang around €140,000 (£120,000) for
weapons, and had plans to search for “subterranean children’s prisons” in which
they believed a secret “world government” was carrying out experiments on
children.
Thomas T, a
60-year-old welder from the rocker scene in the southern state of Bavaria,
together with the group’s future “trans-communications minister” Hildegard
Leiding, also 60, a member of the rightwing AfD party and an astrologer, are
said to have sought out candidates for the “future government” on a “spiritual
basis”, according to their dates of birth, prosecutors said. A star chef from
Austria with a mandate to cook healthy food for the new regime was also
allegedly involved.
On trial
alongside T, will be Melanie Ritter, 57, a doctor specialising in the method of
predicting the future through eggs and a Covid vaccine sceptic who had expected
to become health minister following the coup.
According
to the indictment, former lieutenant colonel Rüdiger von Pescatore, aged 70,
interpreted the death of Queen Elizabeth in September 2022, as “the signal for
an attack by allied forces on Germany” which would mark “Day X”, the coup date,
according to messages he wrote in two of the groups’ various online chat
groups. He expected a resulting power cut to trigger the start of the coup, but
it never happened.
Criminal
investigators have said they observed the first meeting with the group, held by
Prince Reuss, on 25 October 2021, in a pub in the Bavarian town of Helmbrechts.
He had, according to investigators, only wanted international recognition of
his fantasy state “Dukedom Reuss”, in the eastern state of Thuringia, and had
attempted to lobby the Russian consulate general in Leipzig for such
recognition and support for the coup, via his Russian girlfriend. He had
reportedly told the consulate general: “We’ll show you that the German wolf and
the Russian bear are an unbeatable team”. Reuss’s lawyer, Roman von Alvensleben
said last week he would not comment on his client’s position. “I cannot
confirm… that Prince Reuss posed a threat to the existence of the Federal
Republic of Germany and that he would have joined or approved of the use of
violence,” he told German media.
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