Reichsbürger

The German police targeted several individuals from the far-right Reichsbürger, who were suspected of planning a coup. Long been considered as 'crackpots', ...

Investigators also reveal that a kind of “shadow Cabinet” is said to have been formed, with Reuss at the helm. The Querdenker organised some of the largest anti-lockdown protests. Government figures show that Reichsbürger and so-called Selbstverwalter — a grouping with similar beliefs that translates as self-administrators — committed more than 1,000 extremist criminal acts in 2021, double the number in 2020. The 71-year-old has been advocating his idea that the modern German state is illegitimate for years and that the monarchy be restored. He’s the scion of a long-established but minor German royal household from what is now Thuringia, in eastern Germany. For them, the 1937 borders of the German Empire still exist. The Reichsbürger movement, also known as the Reich Citizens’ Movement, is made up of a number of small groups and individuals, located mainly in the states of Brandenburg, Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania and Bavaria in Germany. Adherents of this movement do not accept the legality of the Federal Republic of Germany’s government authorities. Federal prosecutors said the group is alleged to have believed in a “conglomerate of conspiracy theories consisting of narratives from the so-called Reich Citizens as well as QAnon ideology. “We’re talking about a group that, according to what we know so far, planned to violently abolish our democratic state of law and an armed attack,” on the German parliament building, government spokesman Steffen Hebestreit said. “More details keep coming to light that raise doubts about whether these people were even clever enough to plan and carry out such a coup,” Nanni wrote on a post on the social network The German police targeted several individuals from the far-right Reichsbürger, who were suspected of planning a coup.