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…
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.
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.
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.
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. 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.
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.
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."
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.
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. 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.
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."
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.
Why people from all educational and professional backgrounds believe in abstruse narratives is a question that researchers have tried to explore in recent years. 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.
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.
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. That view has since changed completely. The ideological stubbornness and irrationality make supporters of the Reichsbürger movement particularly dangerous, says one senior investigator.
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.
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