Germany's trial of the century: the plot to topple Scholz

He makes for an unlikely terrorist, said Julia Jüttner in Der Spiegel (Hamburg). It's all too easy to dismiss 72-year-old real estate broker Heinrich XIII Prince Reuss as just a confused old man. That's not how German prosecutors see it, though. They accuse him and 24 fellow conspirators of stockpiling 380 firearms, plus sacks full of ammunition, at his hunting lodge in the spa town of Bad Lobenstein, with the intention of taking the Reichstag by storm. 

Their plan, say the prosecutors, was to kidnap Olaf Scholz and his ministers, parade them on TV, and then install Prince Reuss as the head of a new Fourth Reich, its borders based on those of Germany before the First World War.

Last month, the first of what are likely to be three very lengthy trials against the plotters kicked off in Stuttgart, said Michael Rasch in Neue Zürcher Zeitung (Zurich). But it's the one that opened last week in Frankfurt, where Prince Reuss and eight others face charges of seeking to mastermind the "violent overthrow of German democracy", that has caught the world's attention. 

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The 617-page indictment against them reveals that the plotters' ideology is every bit as bizarre as the plot itself. They sincerely believe, it seems, that Germany – and the rest of the world – is ruled by members of a Deep State, and that these rulers also run underground torture camps for children, from whose bodies a rejuvenating elixir that prolongs the lives of the "ruling elite" is extracted. However, the plotters also seem to take heart from the idea that a secret "alliance" of intelligence services and military personnel, from states led by the Russian federation, plans to "liberate" Germany on an unspecified date – "Day X". Some even hold that Queen Elizabeth's death in September 2022 was a trigger for "Day X", the day Scholz would be toppled and Prince Reuss would finally seize power.

Oddly enough, Heinrich XIII Prince Reuss is actually his real name, said Elizabeth Schumacher in Deutsche Welle (Bonn). The House of Reuss was established back in the late 12th century, and in tribute to Holy Roman Emperor Henry VI, each ruler of the House thereafter has named his son Heinrich and put a number after the name. And for centuries, up until the German revolution of 1918, the historic states of Reuss, now absorbed into the German state of Thuringia, were ruled by Reuss princes. 

So perhaps it's not surprising, said Ben Knight in the same paper, that Prince Reuss and his pals, hankering for the good old days, should have joined "the Reichsbürger" (Reich citizens), a German QAnon-style conspiracy movement tracing its origins to the 1980s. Its members all deny the legitimacy of the Basic Law on which Germany's postwar Federal Republic is founded, and hold that the pre-war German Reich still legally exists. Some members refuse to pay taxes; others even print their own passports, declaring themselves monarchs of their own "national territories", which are given resoundingly proud names like the "Free State of Prussia".

It all sounds like something out of a bad movie, said Birgit Baumann in Der Standard (Vienna) – but there's nothing funny about it. Those charged alongside Prince Reuss weren't just harmless cranks: they include a former judge and MP for the far-right Alternative for Germany, Birgit Malsack-Winkemann – slated to be justice minister after the coup; and Rüdiger von P., a former commander of a paratrooper battalion. And the plotters were allegedly geared up to murder civil servants and politicians, including Chancellor Scholz. 

About 23,000 Germans are thought to be involved in the "Reichsbürger scene", said Frank Thadeusz in Der Spiegel (Hamburg), their numbers boosted during the Covid pandemic. Some are just "weirdos", but others are far more sinister: neo-Nazis and Hitler fans. The group hit the headlines in 2016 when a "Reich citizen" named Wolfgang P. killed a police officer in Bavaria. Now, with this failed coup of 2022, it has hit the headlines again in what is going to be one of the biggest terrorism trials Germany has ever seen.