They don’t believe the German state exists, they make their own passports and they want the German monarchy restored. It’s tempting to dismiss the so-called Reichsbürger movement as a bunch of deranged conspiracy theorists. But the movement is growing, increasingly well-connected and willing to use violence to overthrow the state.
In their latest crackdown on extremist Reichsbürger circles, the German authorities on Thursday conducted a coordinated raid involving around 280 police officers in eight of the country’s 16 states. They targeted 20 residences, involving people aged between 25 and 74 who are suspected of having formed a group around a 58-year-old Bavarian man. He had been arrested before, in November 2021, and is accused of running a Telegram channel through which he incited his 22,000 subscribers to commit crimes. Police officers, for instance, may be ‘summarily executed,’ according to the man. He also pronounced ‘death sentences’ against German ministers of government.
The Reichsbürger group targeted by the raid stands accused of organising an attempt to cause a breakdown of governmental communication systems and destabilise administrative structures. They encouraged mass communication of their members with German authorities via emails and telephone calls to cause overload. The recipients reported to have been confronted with conspiracy theories, accusations of war crimes, insults and even death threats. Police confiscated phones, computers and a replica gun.
As this latest example of a failed attempt to bring down the government shows, the threat the Reichsbürger scene poses to the stability of the German state is by no means existential. The domestic security service estimates that 23,000 people belonged to the movement last year. But collectively they committed 1,358 crimes, some of them violent. Collectively, the Reichsbürgers also have significant access to firearms, even though the authorities have retracted 1,100 licences from members since 2016. Dozens still legally keep guns and rifles in the state of Baden-Württemberg alone.
There is also a worrying amount of illegal weapons in the hands of the conspiracy theorists. Earlier this month, a 55-year-old Reichsbürger named as Ingo K was sentenced to 14 years and six months in prison for fourteen acts of attempted murder, grievous bodily harm and attacking enforcement officers. Police suspected that K had possession of an illegal weapon. But when they attempted to raid his house last year, he fired over forty shots at them with a Kalashnikov rifle, injuring three officers. Eventually K surrendered, and police found a walk-in armoury with rifles, machine guns and ammunition. The judge said he was shocked by the suspect’s ‘sheer, boundless hatred for all things to do with the state.’
The Reichsbürgers are a fairly disjointed movement that encompasses people who range from those merely sceptical towards state authority in general to individuals willing to kill to bring it down. It’s unlikely that they will be able to mobilise and organise forces large and efficient enough to pose a systemic danger to the German government, but they are capable of causing significant damage regardless.
What unites its members is what makes them so dangerous: an unwillingness to accept the legal authority of the German state. In their view, the German reich was not abolished in 1918 when its last emperor, Kaiser Wilhelm II, abdicated. So they claim the imperial constitution of 1871 still applies, including the former reich’s (much bigger) borders, its currency and its laws. Others set the cut-off point in 1937, the year the Allies used in their war conferences as the time before Nazi Germany’s acquisition of territory through aggression and war. Yet others feel that the German state has never had any authority over anyone who hasn’t explicitly agreed to this. But despite these differences, the conclusion of such considerations is always the same: the German state has no legitimacy and those seeking to uphold and maintain it are fair game for acts of sabotage, aggression and even murder.
The police have to win every time to render them harmless
Naturally, the police are an obvious target of such rejection of state power. Earlier this year, another policeman was shot and injured during a raid on a group suspected of plotting a coup. But other people and state institutions are also in danger. In 2022, a retired teacher was arrested on suspicion of planning the abduction of health minister Karl Lauterbach with her terrorist Reichsbürger cell called United Patriots. They would then have gone on to cause chaos with attacks on the national grid in order to overthrow the system and reinstate the reich constitution of 1871.
In December 2022 another raid on the Reichsbürgers made headlines, one of the biggest in modern German history. At the centre of it was a 69-year-old man, who was suspected of being the leader of the military branch of a Reichsbürger group. A former paratrooper in Germany’s armed forces, he had managed to recruit other ex-service personnel for a planned coup, prosecutors said. The plan was allegedly to use allies in the police force, in the military and in politics to overthrow the government and install the 71-year-old aristocrat Prince Heinrich XIII of the House of Reuß as Head of State.
As ludicrous as their conspiracy theories and botched putsch attempts may seem, their irrationality doesn’t make the Reichsbürger any less dangerous. They may not be a fundamental threat to political stability in Germany but the networks, access to firearms and blind hatred of some of their sub groups are classic ingredients for terrorism. The police have to win every time to render them harmless, the Reichsbürger only once to show that they are anything but.
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