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The far-right mob smashed through flimsy barriers and raced up the steps of the historic parliament, overwhelming the small cordon of police. The crowd was ecstatic, cheering for the cameras, some waving Trump flags in triumph. This was the moment extremists and conspiracy theorists had dreamed of.
It might sound familiar, but this was not the storming of the Capitol in Washington DC on January 6, 2021. It was Berlin, four months earlier.
On August 29, 2020, a large crowd gathered outside the German parliament building, the Reichstag, ostensibly to protest against COVID restrictions. But they were not just anti-vaxxers. There were Neo-Nazis, QAnon conspiracists, German Trump devotees, far-right politicians and rappers, and a sovereign citizens movement known as Reichsbürger.
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It was a coming together of extremist fringe groups into a unified force forged by COVID lockdowns, when angry, frustrated Germans immersed themselves in extremist online chat groups to share their hatred of the state.
And it has turned the far-right fringe into a force to be reckoned with.
Nicholas Potter, a Berlin-based analyst with anti-fascist research group the Amadeu Antonio Foundation, says COVID led to a kind of “cross-pollination” of far-right groups. “They’re sort of feeding on one another,” he says.
Their attempt to storm the Reichstag ricocheted around the world of online conspiracy movements and inspired others to follow, especially in the US, and then later in Brazil.
“They got the photo opportunity they wanted,” Potter says. “It empowered them, it gave them a feeling of strength and they were able to use the images effectively online. So this is like a blueprint for the far-right rising up and marching on the parliaments.”
And if German prosecutors are correct, it was the opening shot in what would be a full-scale coup attempt, led by Germany’s own sovereign citizens movement, the Reichsbürger.
Citizens of the Reich
You may have heard of “sovereign citizens” in the US or come across them in Australia. They usually tell police, local councils and parking officers that they don’t “consent” to laws and are therefore not obliged to follow them. Often they’re shouty, occasionally they’re violent.
Reichsbürger are the German equivalent, but in a very German way.
So first, a quick German lesson. “Reich” means empire. “Bürger” means citizens. That means Reichsbürger are literally “empire citizens”, usually known in English as “citizens of the Reich”.
It’s a name that intelligence agencies give to people who think modern Germany is a fake state. So-called Reichsbürger tend to hark back to the old German empires. For some it’s Hitler’s Third Reich; for many others it’s the 19th century Kaiser Reich, the German empire led by the kaiser (emperor) until Germany lost World War I and became a republic.
Many feel the state has no authority over them, which is why police now take lots of backup when they have to visit Reichsbürger properties to enforce laws.
In 2017, for example, a former winner of the Mister Germany male beauty pageant, Adrian Ursache, shot a policeman in the neck when the officer tried to evict him from a property he had declared to be a sovereign state.
Another suspected Reichsbürger, known as Ingo K, is currently facing multiple attempted murder charges for opening fire on police who came to confiscate firearms.
“If you reject the state of Germany, you don’t believe that the police are entitled to do that,” says Nicholas Potter. “They are just like actors, they’re not the legitimate arm of the state.”
The belief that the Federal Republic of Germany is illegitimate goes back to the end of World War II, when the Third Reich was overthrown and Germany was occupied by the victorious Allies. Many believe there was never a peace treaty and “this means that Germany is still occupied by Allied forces … or the deep state,” says Potter.
Federal authorities say they know of 23,000 Reichsbürger and estimate 10 per cent are prone to violence. Potter believes the real number is much higher. But nobody knows for sure.
Reichsbürger are more of an online ideological movement than an organisation and many who intelligence agencies call Reichsbürger insist they have nothing to do with the movement, even if they agree that Germany is a fake state.
The ‘king of Germany’
Peter Fitzek is one purported Reichsbürger who completely rejects the title. What his actual title is, he says, is the king of Germany. In 2012, he staged his own coronation to declare himself monarch of a separate kingdom from the Federal Republic of Germany. He even had a crown and ermine cloak for the ceremony.
I meet him at the first branch of his kingdom, a ramshackle property on the edge of Wittenberg, near Berlin. Fighting fit and with his hair in a ponytail, he looks more like the karate teacher he once was than a European monarch. But he takes his kingdom very seriously.
“A kingdom was imperative because, first of all, the Federal Republic of Germany is not a state, certainly not a constitutional state,” he says.
He prints his own passports and drivers’ licences, mints his own coins and says he hasn’t paid tax in 15 years.
“No! For God’s sake, we’re not going to pay taxes to an occupation construct,” he says. “Why should tax money be taken to produce tanks to be shipped to Ukraine? That is not possible for ethical reasons.”
Government authorities have been less than sympathetic to his royalist ambitions. He has been arrested several times for driving without a valid licence and was jailed for running an unauthorised health fund, until the charges were withdrawn.
But his kingdom is expanding relentlessly, with hundreds coming to live and work on his “royal” estates and thousands paying up to 2,500 Euros to attend his weekend courses on how they too can separate from the state. His kingdom is now spread over four properties in Germany, two of them with castles.
While “Peter the First”, as he calls himself, does not feel bound by Germany’s laws, he rejects any suggestion of illegality or rebellion. “We have nothing in common with the people who try to change something in this country by force.”
That’s now a sensitive point for anyone harbouring sovereign citizen views. Last December, the name “Reichsbürger” became synonymous with terrorism in many people’s minds after the biggest police operation in post-war history quashed an alleged coup attempt by a suspected Reichsbürger splinter group.
The “king” had nothing to do with it. But police allege it was led by an actual prince. And this is where the story of the Reichsbürger gets really strange.
Return of the prince
Prince Reuss, also known as Heinrich the 13th thanks to a family tradition that all males are named Heinrich, was by all accounts a disgruntled man. His family had once ruled large parts of what is now the federal state of Thuringia in eastern Germany. But they lost all their royal power after World War I and almost all their royal property after World War II, when a communist regime came to power in East Germany.
After the two Germanies reunited in 1990, he spent years seeking restitution in the courts but lost almost every case. His one victory was to get some family jewels returned, which he used to buy back the family’s old royal hunting lodge in Thuringia, which had reportedly been turned into a youth hostel.
Four years ago, in a speech to a Swiss business forum, he publicly bemoaned the descent of his noble family “after a thousand-year rule” and told the audience how much better people had lived when the Heinrichs were in charge. “Everything was fine in the principality ruled by the Reuss family and people were leading happy lives,” he said.
For good measure, he also explained why modern Germany did not exist. “Ever since Germany surrendered it was never sovereign again,” he said. “Rather, it was an administrative entity of the Allies, the so-called Federal Republic of Germany, in other words, a corporation.”
Soon after Prince Reuss moved into the hunting lodge, a local journalist named Peter Hagen noticed strange goings on. For example, a poster bearing the Reuss family crest was nailed to a tree informing local residents they were “stateless” and would have to register on the internet to actually get valid identity documents.
According to Peter Hagen, it went on to say that an administrator would be appointed “until the rightful prince is back and then takes over the government again”.
“And we know now there were plans to do that,” he says.
Seize the Reichstag
On December 7, Germans woke to news of perhaps the most bizarre counter-terrorism operation in their history. Three thousand police were raiding 130 properties to arrest people suspected of planning to stage a military coup before Christmas.
Peter Hagen had been tipped off about the raid on the hunting lodge, where intelligence agencies believe the alleged coup was plotted, and filmed it unfold.
“Huge numbers of police officers came on foot, who then combed the entire property, all the meadows that belong to it, and huge numbers of vehicles came with special equipment and for the removal of seized objects,” he says.
Prince Reuss and 24 others were charged with a terrorist plot to take over the Reichstag building, arrest or execute their opponents, declare a transitional military government and suspend democracy.
Prosecutors allege the prince was planning to name himself the new head of state, one step from declaring himself the kaiser.
His co-accused included an active soldier, former police officers and a celebrity chef who claimed he was just doing catering.
But the biggest shock was the arrest of a former member of parliament from Germany’s fastest-growing party, the far-right AfD. Birgit Malsack-Winkemann lost her seat in 2021 but retained a pass card to the Reichstag and had allegedly smuggled coup plotters into the building to check its layout.
By late morning, the entire country was asking, “Was zum Teufel?!'”, the German equivalent of WTF?!
‘Gender is gaga’
Not so long ago, the AfD, which stands for Alternative für Deutschland (Alternative for Germany), occupied the same outsider position in politics as Australia’s One Nation Party. It was big enough to have members in parliament but too small to ever take government, and too controversial to partner with a major party.
Suddenly, it’s the second most popular party in Germany and has a real chance of winning in state elections next year. It’s now polling at around 20 per cent, putting it just behind the conservative opposition party, the CDU, and well ahead of the main governing party, the centre-left SPD.
In parts of east Germany, it’s polling better than any other party. That’s despite the Federal Intelligence Service putting it under formal surveillance on suspicion of being a potential threat to democracy, claiming a third of its 30,000 members are known far-right extremists.
Commentators are now calling it the most successful far-right party in Germany since the Nazis. Part of its success is the familiar alt-right playing card of culture wars. The AfD’s deputy leader, Beatrix von Storch, recently declared to parliament, “A fish is not a bike, a man is not a woman, gender is gaga.”
But anti-trans sentiment only goes so far. Beatrix von Storch believes it’s the party’s exposing of migrant crime that may have really turned the tide.
“We’ve got something like 16 rapes per day by illegal migrants,” she says, quoting a figure that has never appeared in any official statistics. “This is what people are no longer willing to accept, and this is why AfD is gaining support in the polls.”
von Storch rejects any suggestion that the party is extremist, arguing its controversial migration policy (it would ban any migrant who can’t pay five million Euros) is not so different from Australia’s.
“People are not starting travelling towards Australia because they know no one will come in without any visa. Is Australia a criminal country? Are you all just racists? Are you all just right-wing extremists?”
Time to leave?
Stephan Kramer, who has run the domestic intelligence agency in the east German state of Thuringia since 2015, rolls his eyes at the AfD’s denials of extremism. Unusually for a civil servant, he says exactly what he thinks.
“They are not any longer the classic Neo-Nazis or Nazis, you know, bald-headed skull caps, standing at the sidewalk with a beer can in their hands,” he says.
“We’re talking about Nazis in suits, basically in the parliaments, in all fields of our society.”
Next year, he expects the AfD to win the state and sack him for exposing its extremism. In 2021, his intelligence agency designated the AfD a far-right extremist group. When the AfD challenged that label in court, Mr Kramer directed the agency to prove it before a judge and won the case. But that didn’t dent the AfD’s popularity.
“I’m very alarmed because you look in Thuringia, the AfD – proven right-wing extremist party by my domestic intelligence – is the biggest opposition party in our state parliament,” he says.
Kramer says the AfD’s support could grow from 28 per cent to as much as 50 per cent in the coming months. He also believes the AfD has been reaching out to far-right fringe groups like the Reichsbürger. “The is a very interesting coalition and makes it also very dangerous because, of course, together in joined forces is much more dangerous than separated,” he says.
In June, the AfD had its first outright victory, winning a district in Thuringia. In next year’s state election, it’s in the box seat to win.
Beatrix von Storch is confident the party’s days on the fringe are ending. “We are not running only to be the opposition party,” she says. “We are running for winning elections and then of course being part of the government.”
Stephan Kramer says he won’t wait around to be sacked. “I am a Jew,” he tells me.
“My personal red line and that for my family will be at that moment the AfD enters government in Germany, either at a state or federal level, we will leave the country.”
Most Germans are confident the centre will hold against extremists from the far right. But some are getting a nervous feeling that history might just repeat itself.
Watch ‘Citizens of the Reich’ tonight on Foreign Correspondent, 8pm on ABC TV and ABC iview.
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