Ex-commander, cake seller and roofer remain silent about violent coup plan in Germany | Abroad

The president of the Higher Regional Court in Stuttgart described the case as “one of the largest criminal trials for state security in the history of the Federal Republic.”

The men, who go by typical German names such as Wolfram, Markus and Matthias, were a Bundeswehr commando, cake seller and roofer in a previous life. But now the German prosecutor accuses the men between 44 and 60 years old of high treason, illegal possession of weapons and forming a terrorist organization.

Allegedly, they were ordered to forcibly depose the Federal Government, in their view controlled by a ‘conspiratorial sect of pedophile elites’, by storming the Bundestag.

On Monday they heard the accusations read out by the judge in Stuttgart behind armored glass, silently and shaking their heads. Only two of them want to respond to the accusations. Last month, a ninth suspect died at the age of 73 after a short illness.

On December 8, 2022, the German police carried out nationwide raids with a great show of force. A total of 26 suspects were arrested, including Prince Heinrich Reuss the 13th, a former real estate agent from Thuringia, and a former Bundestag member of the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party, Birgit Malsack-Winkemann. Both Prince Reuss and Malsack-Winkeman are seen as the masterminds behind the planned coup.

The suspects belong to the Reichsbürger, a radical right-wing movement that longs for the state borders of the German empire that existed between 1871 and 1945. For a long time they were dismissed in Germany as a group of harmless conspiracy theorists.

They rejected German democracy and the rule of law, but were a burden to few. “We must now take this movement very seriously. Partly because of the enormous amount of weapons they have at their disposal,” Thomas Waldenhang, the head of the Federal Office for Verfassungsschutz (the internal security service), said at a press conference last fall.

Since the murder of a police officer in Bavaria in 2016, Reichsbürger have been sharply on the radar of the German security service. Wolfgang P., a 50-year-old martial arts instructor who had joined the Reichsbürger a few years earlier, went to prison for life a year later. According to Haldenwang, the aim of the German security service is to ‘disarm’ the high-risk Reichsbürger.

After arresting the nine suspects in the foiled coup a year and a half ago, German authorities discovered secret and illegal weapons depots in the southern German state of Baden-Württemberg. At the beginning of this year, police also seized a large quantity of weapons in neighboring Hesse, including semi-automatic rifles and ammunition.

That the Reichsbürger in other parts of Germany possess weapons became apparent after questions from the opposition party Die Linke. In the eastern German state of Saxony alone, 81 Reichsbürger have pistols. Only thirteen of them appear to have a valid firearms permit for hunting, for example. The self-proclaimed Reich Citizen King of Germany Peter Fitzek also lives in Saxony. He says he has thousands of ‘subjects’, but says he has no ties to ‘terror prince’ Reuss.

How concrete the coup plan of the Reichsbürger group around Reuss was became apparent when German media revealed that Malsack-Winkemann, then an AfD parliamentarian, gave a tour to a number of Reichsbürger in the parliament building in Berlin. They discussed, among other things, escape routes after plotting a coup.

The criminal trial in Stuttgart will be followed by two other trials, including in Frankfurt, where 72-year-old Prince Reuss and Malsack-Winkemann will appear in court on May 21. All suspects face sentences of a minimum of ten years in prison and up to life in prison.

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