Germany is trying to get the measure of how imminent a threat to the state was posed by the rightwing terror ring exposed on Wednesday, as police made further arrests in connection with the coup plot.
In their biggest ever raid targeting rightwing extremists, German authorities arrested 25 people suspected of plotting to overthrow the government, install a shadow regime led by a 71-year-old aristocrat, and seek talks with Russia to renegotiate its post-second world war settlement.
The head of Germany’s federal criminal police, Holger Münch, on Thursday revised the number of suspects upwards to 52, of whom 23 were currently in custody, adding that further raids and arrests were expected in the coming days.
In the 24 hours since Wednesday’s dawn raids, more details have emerged of how the group’s “council” wanted to run the federal republic as a “German principality” after its violent coup. The minor aristocrat Heinrich XIII, Prince Reuß, was to become head of state, with an obscure corporate lawyer from Hanover to become foreign minister and a family doctor from a village in Lower Saxony to run the health ministry.
Whether the group really had the capacity to turn its power fantasies into reality, however, has been hotly debated.
Heinrich XIII’s tweedy appearance during his arrest has made it easy to make jokes about old men with delusions of grandeur. The left-leaning newspaper taz, known for its wry front pages, merely printed a picture of Heinrich XIII’s arrest, above the headline: “[German president] Steinmeier still in office”.
In the popular Maischberger talkshow on Wednesday night, the TV presenter Micky Beisenherz jokingly speculated whether Heinrich XIII used the same stylist as Alexander Gauland, the Anglophile former co-leader of the far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD). Even when he tried to take the story seriously, Beisenherz struggled: “If I read the news at the moment then I’m quite glad the army doesn’t have any ammunition left,” he quipped.
Talking up the farcical characteristics of the wannabe coup leaders was also in the interest of the AfD, however, whose former member of parliament and active judge Birgit Malsack-Winkemann the plotters had designated as Germany’s future justice minister. “A coup with 50 pensioners?” tweeted far-right MP Petr Bystron. “They’d struggle to take over the town hall of San Marino.”
The Left party delegate Martina Renner, a specialist on far-right terror, criticised the fact that police had apparently informed selected members of the press in advance of Wednesday’s raids to ensure maximum coverage. “The infos had been leaked so widely that it came across as a PR job,” Renner said.
The head of Germany’s domestic intelligence, the federal office for the protection of the constitution, said that while Wednesday’s raids had been preventative, the group’s plans for a bloody coup attempt had been serious.
“Overall, Germany’s security agencies were in control of the situation at all times,” said Thomas Haldenwang. “But if it had been up to this group, then the threat was already quite real.”
In a video uploaded on 27 November, one of the plotters had spoken of an “epochal upheaval” that would take place “in the coming weeks, hopefully before Christmas”.
The group’s plans had recently become more concrete and they had begun to acquire weapons, Haldenwang added: “The affinity to weapons is very high. There are legal and illegal weapons”. Münch said weapons had been seized in 50 out of 150 properties searched, but declined to specify what kind of arsenal his investigators had discovered.
Amid the smirking about cravatted aristocrats, some of the plotters’ links to the military have raised genuine alarm bells. The man whom prosecutors described as the head of the group’s “military arm”, Rüdiger von Pescatore, had once been a commander at paratrooper battalion 251, the elite fighting force that was later submerged into the Special Operations Forces Command (KSK).
One other suspect arrested on Wednesday was at that point still a sergeant tasked with logistics at the KSK, leading to a raid on his office at the special forces barracks in the south-western town of Calw. A spokesperson for the defence ministry on Wednesday did not clarify whether the man’s position in the military unit allowed him access to munitions depots.
The KSK has been the source of a steady stream of far-right scandals in recent years, leading to calls for it to be disbanded. In 2020, a KSK company was dissolved after police seized weapons and ammunition during a raid on the property of one of its soldiers in the eastern state of Saxony.
In 2020, Germany’s defence ministry confirmed reports that 60,000 rounds of ammunition had gone missing from its stocks over the previous 10 years.
Even if the group of plotters around Heinrich XIII would in all likelihood have failed to pull off their fantasies of toppling Germany’s democratic order, the risk of serious bloodshed was credible.
In the former member of parliament Malsack-Winkemann, they allegedly had a co-conspirator who would have been familiar with the security arrangements of the Bundestag and retained an access pass for former MPs.
“A coup d’état may be very unlikely,” said Miro Dittrich, an expert in rightwing extremism, in an interview with newspaper die Zeit. “But since the network very likely had access to guns, it is at least realistic to assume a serious threat to human lives. There would certainly have been deaths.”
