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German authorities arrested 25 members and supporters of a far-right group that prosecutors say was preparing a violent overthrow of the state on Wednesday, December 7. According to the investigations, the suspects were planning an armed attack against the Bundestag, the lower house of Parliament.
An unprecedented raid in Germany. 3,000 officers deployed in 11 of the country’s 16 states detained 25 people suspected of belonging to a “terrorist organization whose objective was to overthrow the existing state order,” the authorities reported on December 7.
22 of the detainees belong to the far-right movement Reichsbürger or “Citizens of the Reich”, the other three are sympathizers.
According to the investigations, those arrested intended an armed seizure of power and other actions, such as causing conditions similar to those of a civil war by attacking the electricity supply and deposing the federal government.
3000 Beamte in elf Bundesländern im Einsatz: Ermittler gehen mit einem Großeinsatz gegen eine Terrorgruppe aus dem »Reichsbürger«-Milieu vor. Diese soll im Untergrund den Umsturz geplant haben: https://t.co/ZkfI8Em6je
— SPIEGEL EIL (@SPIEGEL_EIL) December 7, 2022
Those arrested and relief figures from the extremist movement include judge and former Alternative for Germany (AfD) party deputy Birgit Malsack-Winkemann, a serving soldier in the Bundeswehr Special Forces Command (KSK), a retired military commander and a 71-year-old German aristocrat.
Those arrested are at the disposal of the authorities accused of “belonging to a terrorist organization.”
Although there are 25 detainees, the officials point out that 50 people are on the target list.
An “especially dangerous” move
The Police specified that the majority of those arrested are German, two are Russian citizens and a considerable part of the group has military training or are reservists. The majority of its members are made up of former soldiers of the Bundeswehr and the NVA (National People’s Army of the GDR).
Due to their extreme training and ideology, they are considered by the authorities as a dangerous group.
The far-right Reichsbürger movement to which those captured belong adheres to a “conglomerate of conspiracy theories” of the Reichsbürger and QAnon. Its members do not recognize the legitimacy of present-day Germany.
His theories insist that the “Deutsche Reich”, which was the official name of the German state between 1871 and 1945, still exists despite the defeat of the Nazis in World War II.
The aristocrat detained this Wednesday is a former member of a German royal family, identified as Heinrich XIII PR under Germany’s privacy law, and an alleged leader in a future state while another suspect, Ruediger v. P., was the head of the military arm, according to information from the prosecutors in charge of the case.
Germany’s monarchy was abolished a century ago. When the Weimar Constitution came into force on August 14, 1919, the legal privileges and titles of the German nobility were abolished. Therefore, officially, there are no princes or princesses in the country.
The same sources indicate that Heinrich, who uses the title prince and hails from the Royal House of Reuss, which had ruled parts of eastern Germany, had approached representatives of Russia, whom the group saw as their central contact to establish his new order.
“From the point of view of the association, the main contact for these negotiations is Russia,” stressed the Prosecutor’s Office.
However, the authorities indicated that they did not find evidence that the people contacted had delivered a positive response to their request.
Russia: “It’s an internal problem”
After it became known about the alleged contacts between the members of the far-right organization and that two of the detainees are Russians, the Kremlin remarked that Berlin ruled out that it could be “a Russian intervention.”
Vladimir Putin’s government spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, emphasized that his country has no relation to the raids that occurred in German territory.
“It is an internal problem of Germany. They themselves have said that there can be no talk of Russian intervention. We have found out from the media and we have nothing to say about it,” Peskov said.
The local newspaper ‘Die Zeit’ reported that the group had even begun a nomination of ministers for an eventual post-coup transitional government, in which one of the suspects, former AfD deputy Birgit Malsack-Winkemann, 58, would be minister. federal justice.
The Reichsbürger movement believes that modern Germany is run by a “deep state” conspiracy that was about to be exposed by an alliance of German intelligence agencies and the military of foreign states, including Russia and the US.
With Reuters and local media
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