Prince Putsch and His Gang
The Motley Crew that Wanted to Topple the German
Government
An obscure German blue blood is reportedly at the
center of a strange plan to topple the German government foiled this week by
the country's security services. Observers are describing the development as a
dangerous escalation of the Reichsbürger movement, whose followers want to
overthrow Germany's leaders.
By Maik
Baumgärtner, Jörg Diehl, Roman Höfner, Martin Knobbe, Matthias Gebauer, Tobias
Großekemper, Roman Lehberger, Ann-Katrin Müller, Sven Röbel, Fidelius Schmid
und Wolf Wiedmann-Schmidt
10.12.2022, 13.36 Uhr
The
Waidmannsheil hunting lodge is enthroned on a hill on a bend of the Saale River
in the southeastern part of the eastern German state of Thuringia. It belongs
to the Reussens, a former noble family who ruled the area for 800 years before
the end of the German monarchy.
It was
built for Henry the 72nd between 1834 and 1837, a single-story structure
surrounded by trees and a steep rocky embankment that falls away behind the
building. The entrance portal is flanked by sculptures of a bear and boar, both
of stone. A tower with battlements makes the whole thing look a lot like a
small fortress. Stag antlers hang from the very top of the façade.
The present
lord of the manor is Henry XIII. Prince Reuss, an entrepreneur who established
himself in Frankfurt as a real estate mogul and as a producer of sparkling
wine. Some residents of the small town had been wondering for some time what
the 71-year-old was up to. First, a mysterious sign appeared with the Reussen
coat of arms. Then a sinister looking figure with a walkie-talkie was seen
standing at the entrance to the estate, apparently there to keep prying eyes
out of a meeting.
Since
Wednesday, it seems clear what was going on behind the massive walls. Early
that morning, the GSG9, a special German police force, moved in to root out a
suspected right-wing extremist terror cell. It is believed to include at least
25 members and helpers, and 29 other men and women are also under
investigation. In concert with around 3,000 officers, investigators conducted
raids in 11 German states as well as in the upscale Austrian ski resort town
Kitzbühel and in Perugia, Italy. It was one of the largest operations against
extremists in the history of the German Federal Criminal Police Office (BKA).
For weeks,
investigators from the BKA's State Security Division had been shadowing
suspects, tapping hundreds of landlines and mobile phones, screening bank
accounts and monitoring channels on Telegram, YouTube and Instagram.
Ultimately, the Federal Prosecutor in Karlsruhe concluded that a terrorist
organization had emerged from the milieu of the "Reichsbürger," a
motley crew of politically radicalized Germans who have a weakness for
conspiracy theories and reject the legitimacy of postwar Germany. The cell's
presumed goal was that of overthrowing the political system in Germany in an
armed coup. According to investigators, some members formed the "military
arm" of the group and were apparently willing to do whatever it took.
According to the allegations brought forward by prosecutors, the defendants
accepted the fact that "representatives of the current system" would
be killed in the process.
It is a
rather strange menagerie that came together to overthrow the state. It includes
several former members of the German military's Special Forces Command (KSK),
an active elite soldier, a police officer who had been suspended from duty, a
judge who had been a member of the federal parliament with the far-right
Alternative for Germany party for four years, a pilot, a lawyer who holds a
doctorate degree, a top chef, a tenor singer, an entrepreneur and a doctor - a
surprising number of people from the upper echelons of society.
DER SPIEGEL
50/2022
The article
you are reading originally appeared in German in issue 50/2022 (December 10th,
2022) of DER SPIEGEL.
SPIEGEL
International
They
include members of the Querdenker, a muddled movement that took to the streets
during the pandemic in protest against the federal and state measures to
contain the coronavirus. It also includes followers of the conspiracy cult
QAnon, who are convinced that a "deep state" is pulling the strings
in the background. According to the narrative they espouse, the ruling elite
murder children to harvest a rejuvenation serum.
Previously,
these right-wing enemies of the state had seemed more like an esoteric
political sect than a strictly hierarchical revolutionary commando. The problem
is that there are probably tens of thousands of people in these circles in
Germany who hold views similar to those of Prince Reuss and his followers.
If the
investigators' suspicions are ultimately confirmed, it would mean that Germany
finds itself faced with a new form of terrorism and an enormous societal
challenge. How is the state supposed to deal with citizens with whom it is
unclear if they are just dangerously insane or if they are insanely dangerous?
The world
witnessed just how quickly a group of conspiracy theorists can turn into a
violent mob in Washington, D.C., on January 6, 2021. That's the day around
1,000 supporters of then President Donald Trump, who had been voted out of
office, advanced into the heart of American democracy, the Capitol, a mob that
including a bare-chested man dressed as a Viking. The iconic image would later
serve as a symbol for the vulnerability of democracy. And for how quickly
people can throw out the societal rulebook.
The group
associated with Henry XIII Prince Reuss appear to have modeled themselves after
the far-right revolutionaries in the United States. Members are alleged to have
spent a year planning for the German "Day X," on which, according to
the investigation, they planned to enter the federal parliament building, the
Reichstag, with around two dozen men and women. They intended to handcuff
members of parliament and the chancellor's cabinet in the Bundestag.
According
to investigators, some of the conspirators hoped that the action would spark
unrest throughout the country and eventually lead to a coup. An interim
government was to be formed, headed by Prince Reuss. "We're going to crush
them, the fun is over!" he allegedly said in a call that the authorities
were listening in on.
It is
doubtful whether the alleged terrorists would actually have been capable of
pulling off their crazy ideas. And not just because the Bundestag police have
spent weeks preparing for the possibility of an attack, and the fact that the
BKA's bodyguards, who provide protection for the most important government
ministers, had been put on alert. Indeed, one "Day X" had already
apparently passed without anything happening.
Nevertheless,
the authorities assessed the danger posed by the wannabe revolutionaries as
high. On their path to the great coup, they could have caused a lot of damage,
and the fanaticism of some members could have led them to make unpredictable
moves.
Investigators
say they found weapons in more than 50 of the 150 buildings searched. They
include nine-millimeter pistols, swords, knives, stun guns, combat helmets,
night vision goggles and the service weapons of two police offices, one male,
one female, who are among the suspects. In addition, according to a preliminary
evaluation, investigators seized 130,000 euros in cash and several kilograms of
silver and gold. "The investigations provide a view into the abyss of a
terrorist threat from the Reichsbürger milieu," said German Interior
Minister Nancy Faeser of the center-left Social Democratic Party (SPD).
According to Federal Prosecutor Peter Frank, the group's goal was to eliminate
democracy in Germany "by using violence and military means."
German
Interior Minister Nancy Faeser: the group's goal was to eliminate democracy in
Germany "by using violence and military means."
BKA
officers searched the apartment as masked police officers secured the front
door on the first floor. After around four hours, police led Prince Reuss out
of the building in handcuffs and wearing an FFP2 mask. He wore a large plaid
tan tweed jacket, rust brown corduroy pants, a shirt and neckerchief, his white
hair slicked back - not exactly the appearance one might expect of a terrorist.
Heinrich
XIII Prince Reuss descends from a broadly extended noble family that guided the
fortunes of the Thuringian Vogtland region until the end of World War I. By
family tradition, all male descendants receive the first name Heinrich. To
avoid any confusion, there is an addition to the name: ascending Roman
numerals. Each century, the numbering starts anew. A relative says there are
currently 30 Heinrichs in the family.
Prince
Reuss, born in the western state of Hesse in 1951, graduated with a degree in
engineering and initially worked as an entrepreneur in Frankfurt. He is
considered to be a bon vivant and is married to the daughter of an Iranian
banker. His fondness for fast cars earned him the nickname "Heinrich the
Race Driver" among his family. The headline of one newspaper report about
a joyride taken together with him in eastern Germany read: "A Blue Blood
with Gasoline in His Blood."
After the
fall of the Berlin Wall, he fought in numerous court cases for the restitution
of the family property in Thuringia, which had been expropriated by the
Communist regime of East Germany. He had only limited success. Relatives also
see this as one of the reasons for him drifting into the extremes.
He has
fallen out with the rest of his family. The head of the "family alliance
of the House of Reuss," who resides in Austria, let it be known in a
statement that the relative is a "bitter old man" with
"conspiracy theory delusions."
One can get
a sense of those delusions on YouTube, with one video showing Prince Reuss at a
digital trade show in Zürich. In broken English, he delivers a confused and
anti-Semitic jeremiad. He laments the supposed power held by Jewish capitalists
and claims that World War I played into the hands of U.S. business interests.
He says that the Federal Republic of Germany isn't a sovereign state and that
it is still dominated by the Allies to this very day - all central elements of
the Reichsbürger ideology. The Office for the Protection of the Constitution,
Germany's domestic intelligence agency, estimates that around 21,000 people in
Germany are affiliated with the movement.
Over the
summer, Prince Reuss was involved in a commotion in Bad Lobenstein. The town's
mayor, who holds no political affiliation but is also known for adherence to
conspiracy theories, invited him to a reception. A reporter with the
Ostthüringer Zeitung newspaper asked why a "Reichsbürger" had been
invited to an official event. At a reception following the event, the mayor
then attacked the journalist, who fell to the ground. Later, the mayor was
suspended from his post.
All of this
could be dismissed as a provincial farce, but the authorities soon stumbled
across clues hinting at Reuss' dangerous plans. Prosecutors would later accuse
him of having aspired to build a "New German Army." So-called
"Homeland Security Companies" in the Black Forest, Thuringia and
Saxony had allegedly agreed to help with the "shadow army." A special
commission made up of hundreds of BKA officers called "Shadows" has
been investigating the case since summer.
The
government will soon be replaced by something "new," one of the
suspects announced on YouTube.
Rüdiger von
Pescatore, 69, is thought to have played a leading role. Prior the pandemic, he
spread the following message on the internet: "The truth will be
accessible to mankind only after a system change."
In the
mid-1990s, he had been a commander of a paratrooper battalion of the German
armed forces Airborne Brigade 25 based in Calw near Stuttgart, a kind of
predecessor to the elite KSK unit. That is, until he became the focus of a
scandal in the Bundeswehr.
As a
lieutenant colonel, he had diverted weapons from old stocks of the East German
People's Police and the National People's Army for himself and others. During
that time, 165 functioning pistols and rifles disappeared, and only 11 were recovered.
A court sentenced Pescatore to two years' probation in 1999, ending his career
in the Bundeswehr.
Investigators
believe the former soldier led the "military arm" of the terror
group.
Peter
Wörner, a man who served in the same battalion as Pescatore in the 1990s and
was trained as a survival commando by the Bundeswehr, is also thought to belong
to this "New German Army." On Instagram, he posts photos from his
active-duty days: skydiving in the Pyrenees, heavily armed in the Swabian Alb
mountains, with American special forces in the U.S. The homegrown German Rambo
is 54 years old.
Most
recently, Wörner worked as a trainer teaching survival skills. In Germany and
Norway, he teaches participants how to survive under the most adverse
conditions. One of his courses is called "escape from urban areas."
Another is "urban survival." He once told an Austrian newspaper that
he couldn't rely on the state in an emergency. People are naive and unprepared,
he said.
The German
public TV station ZDF ran a segment about him in 2016. In it, Wörner is seen
preparing a rat as a meal on the forest floor in the Rhön Mountains of
Thuringia. Using a knife, you have to slit the animal once all around, he
explains in the video, then you can easily peel off the skin, "like a pair
of pants or a jacket."
Wörner
first came onto the radar of terror investigators in the spring during an
investigation into the Querdenker movement. During a search of his home in the
Fichtelgebirge Mountains, police officers found a pistol and ammunition that
Wörner was apparently not authorized to possess. In a YouTube video discovered
by investigators, he talks about a coup. He says the government is nothing but
a "criminal clique" that will soon be replaced by something
"new."
Later, in
conversations intercepted by investigators, the former elite soldier talks
about storming the Reichstag building to arrest members of parliament.
His case
would be the starting point for the investigation that led to Prince Reuss and
his alleged plans to topple the government. And the network also apparently
includes a soldier who is an active member of the KSK elite military force.
Andreas M.
is assigned to the special Bundeswehr unit as a logistician, but he is more of
a bureaucrat than a well-trained commando. Nevertheless, the staff sergeant has
plenty of military experience, having served several tours in Afghanistan with
the Bundeswehr. He even wrote a book about the war, called "You Can Die
Every Day," a kind of eyewitness account from the front.
Following
his deployments in Afghanistan, he joined the KSK in Calw. Fellow soldiers from
the small, largely segregated elite unit describe the 58-year-old as being
somewhat of an oddball, but otherwise not particularly compelling.
The fact
that Andreas M. was trending toward radicalization could certainly have been
detected by the KSK. By 2021, at the latest, his WhatsApp profile picture
suggested a penchant for conspiracy theories, even mentioning the "deep
state." But it would take months before his superiors at the KSK grew
suspicious. In February, he refused to take the coronavirus vaccine. He wrote
that it is questionable whether compulsory vaccination in the Bundeswehr is
"compatible with the Allied occupation law still in force." At that
point, they called in MAD, the military intelligence service. They then
determined that he was part of the Querdenker movement and ordered him to take
several weeks of sick leave.
Investigators
believe that M. smuggled members of the suspected terrorist group into barracks
in October using his military ID. Their deranged plan, according to the
investigation, was to inspect whether the facilities would be suitable for
housing their own troops after the coup.
The soldier
apparently isn't the only person working for the government who used his free
time to prepare for the elimination of that very state. Among those arrested
was a judge at the Berlin Regional Court, Birgit Malsack-Winkemann, who holds a
doctorate degree in law.
It was
still dark out, when law enforcement officers closed in on her. Police officers
snuck through the neighbor's backyard to her home in the upper middle class
Berlin district of Wannsee. At 6 a.m., they banged their fists on the door.
"Police," one yelled. Then there was a crash – the men used a crowbar
to force their way into the judge's house.
Malsack-Winkemann
is alleged to have been involved since summer in the plans to break into the
Reichstag building. She would have been a valuable expert for preparations:
From 2017 to 2021, the 58-year-old held a seat in the Bundestag as a member of
the right-wing AfD party. Until her arrest, she was a member of the party's
Federal Arbitration Court, which decides on expulsion proceedings against
particularly extreme members. Her knowledge of the Bundestag could have been
helpful to the terrorist group, the investigators believe. Until her arrest,
she also possessed a pass to get into the Bundestag as a former member of
parliament.
Malsack-Winkemann's
lawyer declined to comment on the allegations, as did Prince Reuss' defense
lawyer. Lawyers for most of the other defendants could not be reached for
comment.
In her
party, the judge was considered part of the less radical camp, which says quite
a bit about the AfD. She was extremely adept at spreading agitation and fake
news.
For
example, she claimed in a speech in the Bundestag that refugees are
"colonized with antibiotic-resistant bacteria." During the pandemic,
she speculated that a 13-year-old girl died because she had been wearing a
mask, an outright lie. She also described Donald Trump as a "true
statesman," even after the storming of the Capitol that he had stoked.
In 2021, in
a party conference speech, the lawyer called for resistance to the "Great
Reset," a conspiracy ideology with anti-Semitic connotations, according to
which "the elites" were using the coronavirus crisis to carry out a
"great reboot" of the global economic system. In a Telegram channel
bearing her name, messages with a slogan of the QAnon cult were disseminated
until a few weeks ago. When DER SPIEGEL asked her if it was her channel, the
AfD politician denied it. Shortly afterwards, the entries disappeared.
After she
left the Bundestag, the Berlin judicial administration sought to prevent Malsack-Winkemann
from returning to the regional court – initially without success. Since then,
she has again been able to render verdicts at Chamber 19a, which is responsible
for construction matters.
Even during
the legal tug-of-war over her job, Malsack-Winkemann had become a target of
terror investigators. Officers shadowed her and observed her as the judge met
with Henry XIII Prince Reuss, the suspected ringleader, in a Berlin restaurant.
Another AfD functionary was also present at the meeting.
Among the
accused, there are at least two other men who are or were active in the AfD at
the regional level. Also accused is Michael Fritsch, the leading candidate in
the state of Lower Saxony for Die Basis, a party linked to the Querdenker
movement, in the 2021 federal election. Within the scene, they call him the
"protection man with a heart and a brain."
The
59-year-old used to be the chief detective at the Hannover Police Department.
That is, until he attracted attention with crude statements at rallies and was
suspended. He spoke of alleged parallels between the SS and today's
"security apparatus." As early as 2020, Fritsch returned his German
identity card and applied for a "citizenship card," as is customary
in the Reichsbürger scene. He also requested to have his birth state changed to
"Prussia." A court has since ruled that the police can remove him from
the civil service, a decision he appealed. His defense attorney didn't want to
comment on the terror allegations from the Federal Prosecutor's Office.
For all its
bizarreness, what makes the group so dangerous is its deep hatred of the state
and the governing politicians. And its access to weapons. Several of the
defendants allegedly possessed pistols and rifles, some legally and others
illegally.
According
to investigators, some of the suspects practiced shooting on Oschenberg
Mountain near Bayreuth in Bavaria. The conspiratorial actions of the group
created a major headache for investigators. The hard core of the group
allegedly equipped itself with around a dozen Iridium satellite phones that
have a unit price of around 1,500 euros each. They would still work even if the
mobile phone network collapsed. The conspirators also allegedly signed
nondisclosure agreements. Those who violated the terms would face death, it
stated.
According
to investigators, Alexander Q. is among the supporters of Reuss' group. He runs
one of the most trafficked German QAnon channels on Telegram, with more than
131,000 subscribers. His channel has an innocuous name: "Just ask
us." But the hashtags he uses, such as WWG1WGA, quickly make clear what it
is really about – the abbreviation stands for the motto of the QAnon disciples:
Where we go one, we go all.
In his
voice messages, he regularly railed against the "fascist regime" and
spread fake news nonstop. In July 2021, shortly before the massive flooding
disaster in Germany's Ahr Valley, he claimed, for example, that the flood water
had washed up the corpses of 600 children. He claimed they had been imprisoned
for years in underground facilities, where they were tortured and finally
killed in order to deprive them of the metabolic chemical compound
adrenochrome, which supposedly has a rejuvenating effect. The tale of murdered
children is a popular conspiracy tale among followers of the QAnon cult.
Four weeks
after the 2021 federal election in Germany, the Telegram propagandist posted a
voice message on his channel warning of a large scale fraud – like the one in
the U.S. In the eyes of QAnon supporters there, Donald Trump was removed from
power through election fraud. The unleashed their fury by storming the Capitol.
Germany has
also had a similar scare, although on a much smaller scale. In the summer of
2020, supporters of conspiracy theories stormed the stairs of the Reichstag
building on the sidelines of a major protest in Berlin against measures aimed
at containing the spread of the coronavirus. A QAnon disciple had given the
signal to run: "We're going up there and taking our house back here today
and from now on!" For a brief moment, only three policemen stood between
the roaring crowd and the entrance gate to the house of parliament. Then
reinforcements arrived and they succeeded in keeping parliament sealed off.
Why people
from all educational and professional backgrounds believe in abstruse
narratives is a question that researchers have tried to explore in recent years.
Social
psychologist Pia Lamberty differentiates between misinformation and
disinformation and broader conspiracy narratives. She says that people are
particularly susceptible to fake news if they have neither the capacity nor the
motivation to delve deeply into a topic. The simpler or more emotional the
answers, the easier it is for them to catch on.
She says
the belief in all-encompassing conspiracy narratives, on the other hand, has
more to do with a person's own identity and psychological phenomena, with a
general distrust of "powerful people" such as politicians or
scientists, for example. That, she says, can lead to the conviction that
everything bad that happens in society is the result of secret planning.
Lamberty considers the group that has now been uncovered to be "extremely
dangerous" precisely because of its composition.
The retreat
of many people into the digital world during the pandemic has led to further
growth in the number of people following and believing in conspiracy theories.
In the relevant channels and networks, people found their peers turning hose
channels into echo chambers that often lacked any countering viewpoints or factual
comparisons. The war in Ukraine and the subsequent economic crisis have
exacerbated that development. Crises act as catalysts for a fundamental
critique of the system. "What is decisive for the success of the
conspiracy theory is not its truth content, but its potential to plausibly
resolve contradictions, neuroscientist and psychiatrist Philipp Sterzer writes
in his book "The Illusion of Reason."
The result
is a polarization of society, with the group that rejects the political system
growing increasingly visible. It's a development that the British-American
economist and Nobel Prize winner Angus Deaton, for example, currently believes
is affecting the entire West. Deaton says it is related to the declining growth
in recent decades.
As is the
case with many movements in society, extremist groups develop on the fringes,
believing that they can only achieve their goals through violence. During the
1968 era, it was groups like the far-left Red Army Faction, and, more recently,
terrorist groups formed out of Salafist circles. And it was only a matter of
time before radical groups would emerge from the coronavirus skeptics and the
Querdenker movement, for whom protests in the streets or on the internet didn't
go far enough.
The
increasing propensity for violence within these circles had been apparent for
some time. As the pandemic has progressed, the tone on relevant Telegram
channels had become increasingly bellicose. There has been talk of
"overthrowing the ruling criminal regime," of "revenge"
that would be cruel: "They will all be hanged in the end."
As early as
May 2021, the Interior Ministry for the state of North Rhine-Westphalia, warned
that such violent digital fantasies could lead "to the establishment of
terrorist structures." The different branches at the federal and state
level of Germany's domestic intelligence agency, the Office for the Protection
of the Constitution, increasingly started infiltrating "virtual
agents" into chat groups: with fake profiles whose authors only pretend to
belong to the scene in order to be able to detect when words turn into deeds.
But the sheer number of channels makes it impossible for authorities to keep
track of all potential perpetrators of violence.
Radical
circles that had long marched separately also came together on the streets.
They included right-wing extremists, the Reichsbürger, followers of the
anti-Muslim group PEGIDA, fans of the AfD, New Age esoterics and opponents of
vaccination. In the end, it barely mattered whether it was against the
anti-corona measures, the government's position in the Ukraine war or the
skyrocketing prices. What united them is their hatred of "the people at
the top."
From the
stages of the demonstrations, speakers chanted once again that "the Reichstag
should be swept out," and all the members of parliament should be
replaced. They railed that government ministers were crazy or "just
mercenaries" waging economic war against the German people. That there is
a need for "resistance" and that the police should join them. They
longed for a coup.
Some
followed their sense of longing even before Prince Reuss and his group were
accused of planning the coup.
Several
months ago, a group from the Reichsbürger and Querdenker circles apparently
made plans to kidnap German Health Minister Karl Lauterbach. They wanted to
abduct him while he was on a talk show, live on camera. The code word for the
operation: "Klabautermann," the name for hobgoblin from German
mythology. According to investigators, Lauterbach's bodyguards were to be taken
out with shots from machine guns, after which point the government was to be
forced to resign. According to court records, the group also wanted to get
their blessing for the coup from Russia.
Emissaries
wanted to cross the Baltic Sea to Kaliningrad by ship and ask for an audience
with the Kremlin – with Vladimir Putin himself. Five suspected members of the
cell are in custody.
A
completely insane plan. What is known is that the group had already secured
weapons and was trying to get its hands on more. An undercover investigator
from the Rhineland-Palatinate State Criminal Police Office possibly thwarted
worse from happening.
Two cases
from Baden-Württemberg show how unpredictable the threat really is. In April,
the police wanted to confiscate a weapon from a Reichsbürger ideologue who had
been banned from possessing it. When police in the town of Boxberg-Bobstadt
arrived to search the house, the man fired several dozen shots from a fully
automatic rifle, injuring two officers. On the Reichsbürger's property, the
investigators discovered a kind of walk-in armory, and they found a machine gun
that had been set up in the living room.
A few weeks
earlier, a Reichsbürger adherent had apparently deliberately run over a
policeman during a traffic check in the southern Baden region in the state. He
told the magistrate they didn't have the right to arrest him, that the
magistrate lacked the "legal capacity."
The
authorities long underestimated the movement of "Reichsbürger and self-administrators."
Many laughed them off as crackpots who wield in fantasy IDs and proclaim
kingdoms. But dangerous? They thought not.
That view
has since changed completely. The ideological stubbornness and irrationality
make supporters of the Reichsbürger movement particularly dangerous, says one
senior investigator.
One man
whose radicalization took place on the open stage is Maximilian Eder.
Investigators also count him among the group surrounding Heinrich XIII Prince
Reuss. He is alleged to have received 50,000 euros from him to further equip
their "military arm," the "New German Army." It is unclear
how that money was eventually used – some fellow campaigners have accused him
of squandering it.
Eder, now
63, served as colonel in the Bundeswehr. In 1999, he led a Bavarian armored
infantry battalion into Kosovo. Prior to his retirement in the autumn of 2016,
he served intermittently in the KSK. During the pandemic, he became one of the
leading figures of the radical protests against the government and its anti-coronavirus
measures.
At one
Querdenker demonstration, he demanded that KSK fighters should conduct a
"thorough purge in Berlin." He called mandatory vaccinations for
soldiers a "crime against humanity."
When a
flood in Rhineland-Palatinate inundated the Ahr Valley in July 2021, Eder and
his fellow campaigners cast themselves as helpers for people in distress. The
retired colonel appeared on the scene in uniform and signed official-looking
deployment orders with leading figures in the Querdenker movement. The supposed
helpers set up shop in Ahrweiler in a former school. Eder described himself as
the "leader of the command center" and to former elite soldier Peter
Wörner, also arrested this week, as the "chief of staff."
Rather than
helping, though, the men and their followers only created trouble in the flood
zone. In the end, the city had the school cleared out. Eder was fined 3,500
euros for the unauthorized wearing of uniforms.
The retired
officer grew increasingly radicalized. In November in a video filmed deep in
Bavaria, he called for a coup. In it, Eder can be seen standing in the middle
of the forest, in Bundeswehr camouflage, shaking a rock. If "a few
determined people" got to work, the system could be shaken up, he says in
it. And all this won't take much longer, the retired colonel says as if some
oracle, "it will be before Christmas." Now, he is being held in
pretrial detention.
Much of
what the Reuss troops are accused of having planned seems like something out of
a bad, feverish dream. In addition to a military arm, it is said to have had a
political arm that met at least five times this year: the so-called
"Council," a kind of shadow government.
The group
already appears to have reached agreement on some cabinet posts. Heinrich XIII
Prince Reuss was likely intended as head of state, and Judge Malsack-Winkemann
as justice minister. But as in real life, there appears to have been infighting
over power and posts in the shadow cabinet. According to the investigations,
the leadership of the finance ministry had been especially controversial. One
candidate some comrades would have liked to see on the "Council"
apparently isn't liked by Prince Reuss. And the candidate designated as
"foreign minister" apparently preferred to become finance minister.
The group
wasn't very successful in its foreign policy ambitions. An attempt to get
Russia's blessing for a coup failed. Heinrich XIII Prince Reuss and his
girlfriend Vitalia B., who is from the Russian exclave of Kaliningrad, are said
to have paid visits to the Russian Consulate General in Leipzig, but according
to the Federal Prosecutor's Office, there is nothing to suggest that the
Russians "reacted positively to his request." Vitalia B.'s defense
lawyer initially didn't want to comment on the accusations.
Apparently,
there were hardly any bounds to the insanity of the political sect. According
to investigators, the group firmly believed in a supposed international secret
alliance, the "Alliance." The men and women are said to have waited
longingly for the "Alliance" to rush to their aid – and "clean
out" the upper echelons of the Federal Republic of Germany. Then they
could upend the rest of the country.
The
conspirators had also already filled some rather unusual posts in their shadow
government. The office of the representative for "spirituality and
healing" was to be led by a doctor from the state of Lower Saxony, who
reportedly gave the group 20,000 euros. Meanwhile, an astrologer from the
Bergstrasse district in the state of Hesse was to be responsible for "transcommunication."
About Our
Reporting
Like other
media, DER SPIEGEL reported very early on Wednesday morning about the police
action. Since then, we have been asked how we knew about it. The answer:
through contacts and sources. When ministries in 11 states and the federal
government, when dozens of Offices for the Protection of the Constitution and
state criminal investigation departments and thousands of officers are
involved, well-connected reporters are likely to hear about it. That’s not a
peculiarity of this case, it's our job. You have to handle this kind of
knowledge responsibly. We don't want to endanger anyone, because if a raid
escalates, you are putting human lives at risk. We only report comprehensively,
independently and unfettered when, in our view, the time is right.
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