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Europe|What to Know: First Trial in Alleged Coup Plot in Germany Begins
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/29/world/europe/germany-far-right-plot-court.html
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Three trials this spring are centered on the Reichsbürger movement. Some of its members say the modern German state is actually a corporation run by shadowy bureaucrats.
Nearly a year and a half after police and intelligence officers in Germany uncovered a plot to overthrow the country’s government and replace its chancellor, the first of three trials in the sprawling case began on Monday in Stuttgart.
Most of the would-be insurrectionists were arrested in December 2022, when heavily armed German police officers stormed houses, apartments, offices and a remote royal hunting lodge and made dozens of arrests. Those eventually charged included a dentist, a clairvoyant, an amateur pilot and a man running a large QAnon social media group. The German authorities contend that their figurehead was Prince Heinrich XIII of Reuss, an obscure and conspiracy-minded aristocrat who would have been made chancellor if the coup had succeeded.
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Despite that idiosyncratic membership, the group was well organized and dangerous, investigators said. Some of its members were former officers trained by German elite military forces. One was a judge turned far-right lawmaker with Alternative for Germany, the surging populist party known as the AfD. The police said the group had stashed more than a half-million dollars in gold and cash; amassed hundreds of firearms, tens of thousands of rounds of ammunition and a cache of explosives; and secured satellite phones to communicate once it disabled national communications networks.
“All the satirical elements that are naturally present in this group — elements of QAnon, the belief in U.F.O.s, esotericism, the idea of being able to overthrow the system of the Federal Republic of Germany — should not distract from the fact that this group posed a grave potential threat,” said Jan Rathje, a member of a nongovernmental organization that monitors conspiracy theories and right-wing extremism.
In a wood-paneled courtroom in Stuttgart on Monday, federal prosecutors started trying to prove that the group came dangerously close to launching an attack on the democratic foundation of Europe’s largest country.
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