The hunting lodge Waidmannsheil sits enthroned on a hill at a loop of the Saale in the south-east of Thuringia.
It belongs to the former noble family of the Reussen, who ruled the area for almost 800 years before the German monarchy slowly came to an end.
Built by Henry the Seventy-second of Reuss-Ebersdorf in 1834-1837, it is a one-story structure surrounded by trees and a rocky embankment that drops steeply at the rear of the building.
The entrance portal is lined with a bear and a boar made of stone, a tower with battlements makes the walls appear like a small stronghold, and a deer's antlers hang at the top of the facade.
Today the lord of the castle is Heinrich XIII.
Prince Reuss, an entrepreneur who became known in Frankfurt am Main as a real estate dealer and sparkling wine producer.
Some residents of the small town have been wondering for some time what the 71-year-old is up to in his Bad Lobenstein hunting lodge.
First a mysterious notice with the Reuss coat of arms appeared, then sinister figures with walkie-talkies stood at the entrance to the castle.
Apparently they were supposed to protect a secret meeting from prying eyes.
It has been clear since Wednesday what was happening behind the massive walls: early in the morning, the GSG-9 arrived to dig out a suspected right-wing extremist cell.
At least 25 members and helpers should belong to it, against 29 other women and men in their environment is determined.
The investigators struck in eleven federal states, as well as in the Austrian posh ski resort of Kitzbühel and in Italian Perugia.
It was one of the largest operations against extremists in the history of the Federal Criminal Police Office.
Investigators from the state security department followed suspects for months, tapped almost 200 telephones and cell phones, checked accounts and monitored channels on Telegram, YouTube and Instagram.
In the end, the Federal Public Prosecutor in Karlsruhe was certain: a terrorist organization had emerged in the milieu of Reich citizens.
Their presumed goal: an overthrow of the political system in Germany, a putsch with weapons.
Some members formed the group's "military arm" and were apparently prepared to go to extremes.
According to the judicial files, the fact that there will also be "killings of representatives of the current system will at least be accepted by the accused."
It is an unusual group that has come together for the coup d'état: several former members of the Bundeswehr's Special Forces Command (KSK), an active elite soldier, a police officer who has been suspended from duty, a judge who has worked for the AfD for four years sat in the Bundestag;
a pilot, a lawyer with a doctorate, a top chef, a tenor singer, an entrepreneur, a doctor - all in all a mirror of better society.
Lateral thinkers are there, supporters of the movement that took to the streets during the pandemic to protest against the federal and state corona policies.
Likewise, followers of QAnon who are convinced that a “deep state” is pulling the strings in the background.
The ruling elite, the conspiracy narrative continues, would abuse children to obtain rejuvenation hormones.
The right-wing enemies of the state appear more like an esoteric political sect than a strictly hierarchical revolutionary command.
If the investigators' suspicions were finally confirmed, it would be a new form of terrorism and an enormous social challenge: How should one deal with people of whom one does not know exactly whether they are just dangerously insane or already insanely dangerous?
On January 6, 2021 in Washington, it was possible to see how quickly a group of strange personalities can turn into a dangerous mob.
Several hundred supporters of former President Donald Trump penetrated to the heart of American democracy, the Capitol.
In the end, a shirtless man dressed as a Viking sat in the Vice President's chair.
The iconic image stood for the vulnerability of democracy.
And also for how quickly people become radicalized and turn away from the social rules.
The right-wing revolutionaries from the USA, the group around Heinrich XIII.
Prince Reuss apparently taken as a role model.
For a year, several members are said to have been making plans for the German “Day X”, on which they might have wanted to enter the Reichstag building with a good two dozen men and women.
In the Bundestag, MPs and members of the government should be handcuffed and arrested.
The action, some of the conspirators apparently hoped, would lead to riots across the country and eventually to a coup.
A transitional government was to be established, headed by Henry XIII.
Prince Reuss.
"We'll flatten them now, that's the end of the fun," he is said to have said in a wiretapped call.
It is doubtful whether the suspected terrorists would actually have been able to put their insane ideas into practice.
Not only because the Bundestag police have been preparing for such a scenario for weeks and the bodyguards of the BKA, who guard the most important ministers, have been put on alert.
The deadline for "Day X" has passed twice without anything happening.
Nevertheless, the authorities assessed the danger of the would-be revolutionaries as high: Already on the way to the great overthrow they could have caused a lot of damage, the fanaticism of some members could have led to panic attacks.
The investigators found weapons in 50 of the 150 houses searched.
There were pistols, revolvers and rifles, knives, swords and crossbows as well as combat helmets and night vision goggles.
In addition, tens of thousands of euros in cash and kilos of silver and gold.
"The investigations allow us to look into the abyss of a terrorist threat from the Reich citizen milieu," said Interior Minister Nancy Faeser (SPD).
The aim of the group was to "eliminate democracy in Germany using force and military means," said Attorney General Peter Frank.
The dream of the highest office in the state bursts for Henry XIII.
Prince Reuss on Wednesday morning just after six o'clock.
Special forces arrive with battering rams and night vision devices and break into an Art Nouveau building in Frankfurt's Westend.
The nobleman lives at the top, in the attic on the fifth floor.
BKA officers search the apartment, hooded police officers secure the front door on the ground floor.
After a good four hours, the prince is led out of the house in handcuffs and with an FFP2 mask, well dressed as always.
He is wearing a light brown tweed jacket with a large check, rusty brown corduroy trousers, a shirt and a scarf, and his white hair is combed back.
From a purely visual perspective, the accused is an unusual prince of terror.
Henry XIII
Prince Reuss comes from a widely ramified old noble family that steered fortunes in the Thuringian Vogtland until the end of the First World War.
Family tradition requires that all male descendants be given the first name Heinrich.
To avoid confusion, the name gets an addition in ascending Roman numerals.
The numbering restarts every century, currently there are 30 Heinrichs in the family, says one of the relatives.
Prince Reuss, born in Hesse in 1951, completes his studies with a degree in engineering and initially works as an entrepreneur in Frankfurt am Main.
He was considered a bon vivant, married the beautiful daughter of an Iranian banker.
In his family, Prince Reuss was nicknamed "Henry the Racing Driver" because of his fondness for fast cars.
"Blue-bloods with petrol in their veins," was the title of a newspaper on a jaunt through East Germany with him.
After reunification, he fights in court for the restitution of the family property in Thuringia, which had been expropriated by the communists.
But he has little success with it.
Relatives see this as the reason for his increasing drift.
The clan falls out with him.
The head of the Reuss princely house, who resides in Austria, lets it be known in a letter that the relative is a “bitter old man” who has “conspiracy theory misconceptions”.
You can get a picture of it on YouTube, a video shows Prince Reuss at a digital fair in Zurich.
In clumsy English, he launches into a confused, anti-Semitic sweeping attack.
He bemoans the perceived power of Jewish capitalists and claims that World War I played into the hands of US business interests.
The Federal Republic is not a sovereign state, to this day Germany is ruled by the Allies.
They are central elements of the Reich citizen ideology.
The Office for the Protection of the Constitution estimates that around 21,000 people in Germany are attached to it.
In the summer of this year, Prince Reuss unleashed a tumult in Bad Lobenstein.
The non-party mayor, himself a supporter of perverse theses, has invited Prince Reuss to a reception.
A reporter from the Ostthüringer Zeitung raises the question of what a "Reich citizen" is doing at the official meeting, when the mayor pushes him to the ground.
The mayor was later suspended.
(SPIEGEL 37/2022)
All this could be dismissed as a farce from the provinces, but the authorities soon get clues as to the nobleman's dangerous plans.
Prince Reuss wanted to set up a "New German Army," the arrest warrant later said, with "home security commandos" in Horb in the Black Forest, in Heberndorf in Thuringia and in XY in Saxony.
A "shadow army" was planned, so the suspicion.
Since late summer, a special commission with hundreds of BKA officials has been investigating the case, the BAO »shadow«.
Rüdiger von P., 69 years old, is believed to have played a leading role.
Even before the pandemic, he spread the following on the internet: "The truth will only be accessible to mankind after the system change."
In the mid-1990s, he was commander of a paratrooper battalion of the 25th Airborne Brigade based in Calw, a kind of predecessor of the KSK special unit.
Until he became the focus of a Bundeswehr scandal.
As a lieutenant colonel, he had used weapons from the old stocks of the GDR People's Police and the National People's Army (NVA) for himself and others.
165 functional pistols and rifles disappeared during this time, only eleven were recovered.
Von P. was sentenced to two years' imprisonment on probation in 1999, his military career was over.
The investigators assume that the aging ex-elite soldier led the "military arm" of the terrorist group.
Peter Wörner, who served in the same battalion as von P. in the 1990s and was trained as a lone fighter, is said to also belong to it.
He posts photos from his active service on Instagram: parachuting in the Pyrenees, heavily armed in the Swabian Jura, with American special forces in the United States.
A German Rambo, today he is 54 years old.
Most recently, Wörner works as a survival trainer.
In Germany, Sweden and Norway he teaches participants how to survive under the most adverse circumstances.
One of his courses is called "Escape from Conurbations," another "Urban Survival."
The state, he tells an Austrian newspaper, cannot be relied on.
People are effeminate, naive, unprepared.
ZDF broadcasts a report about him.
You can see Wörner preparing a rat as a meal on the forest floor in the Thuringian Rhön.
You have to slit the animal all the way around with a knife, he explains, then you can easily peel off the skin, "like pants or a jacket."
At the end, the participants bite into the animals roasted in the fire in disgust.
In the spring, W. aroused the interest of the investigators for the first time, during investigations into a radical group from the lateral thinker milieu.
During a search of his house in the Fichtelgebirge, police officers find a semi-automatic pistol and ammunition that Wörner apparently possesses illegally.
In a YouTube video that investigators came across, he speaks of a coup.
The government is nothing but a "criminal clique" that will soon be replaced by something "new."
Later, conversations are intercepted in which the ex-elite soldier talks about storming the Reichstag building to arrest MPs.
His case is a starting point for the investigations that lead to Prince Reuss and his plans.
It is explosive that an active KSK soldier also belongs to his network.
Andreas M. is deployed as a logistician in the Bundeswehr special unit, he is more of an office warrior than a well-trained commando soldier.
Nevertheless, the staff sergeant has plenty of military experience.
He went to Afghanistan with the Bundeswehr several times.
He wrote a book (»You Can Die Every Day«) about the war in the Hindu Kush, a kind of eyewitness account from the front.
After his trips to Afghanistan, he finally came to the KSK in Calw.
Comrades from the small, largely isolated elite association describe the 58-year-old as a somewhat odd but otherwise inconspicuous guy.
The fact that Andreas M. became radicalized could have been noticed at the KSK.
Since 2021 at the latest, his WhatsApp profile picture has hinted at a soft spot for conspiracy theories.
The tile talks about the “deep state” and Germany needs a “reload”.
But it was months before the superiors at the KSK became suspicious.
Only when M. refused the corona vaccination in a confusing letter at the beginning of the year, which is mandatory for the Bundeswehr, was the military intelligence service MAD involved.
He classified M. as a lateral thinker, but he had been at home on sick leave for weeks.
The investigators assume that M. smuggled members of the suspected terrorist group into several barracks in October with his military ID card.
Their insane plan, according to the arrest warrant: to inspect the Bundeswehr facilities "for their suitability for housing their own troops after the overthrow".
The soldier is not the only one in the civil service who apparently prepares everything in his free time to eliminate this very state.
Among those arrested is an active judge at the Berlin Regional Court, Birgit Malsack-Winkemann, a doctor of business law.
It is still dark when the rule of law is activated against them.
Police officers sneak through the neighboring garden to their house in the middle-class Wannsee district of Berlin.
At 6:00 a.m., they bang on the door with their fists.
"Police," someone yells.
Then a cracking sound fills the air.
They break into the judge's house with a crowbar.
Malsack-Winkemann is said to have been involved in plans to break into the Reichstag building since the summer.
She would be a valuable expert for the preparation: From 2017 and 2021, the 58-year-old sat in the Bundestag herself as a member of the AfD.
Until her arrest, she was a member of the court of arbitration of the Partre, which decides, among other things, on procedures for the exclusion of particularly radical members from the party.
The investigators suspect that their detailed knowledge of the Bundestag could have helped the terrorist group.
Until her arrest, she still had a house card as an ex-MP.
Malsack-Winkemann's lawyer initially did not want to comment on the allegations.
In her party, the judge was considered more moderate, which perhaps says more about the AfD than about her.
She was quite good at spreading hate speech and fake news.
In a Bundestag speech, for example, she claimed that refugees were "colonized with antibiotic-resistant bacteria."
During the pandemic, she spread the false news that a 13-year-old girl had died from wearing a mask.
And ex-President Trump described her as a "true statesman" even after the storm he fueled on the Capitol.
In 2021, in a party speech, the lawyer called for resistance to the “Great Reset”, a conspiracy ideology with anti-Semitic connotations, according to which “the elites” were using the corona crisis to carry out a “great restart” of the global economic system.
Until a few weeks ago, messages with a slogan of the Q-Anon cult were also distributed in a Telegram channel with her name.
When SPIEGEL asked her if it was her channel, the judge said no.
Shortly thereafter, the entries were gone.
After leaving the Bundestag, the Berlin judiciary tried to prevent Malsack-Winkemann from returning to the regional court - without success.
they pass judgment again at Chamber 19a, which is responsible for building law issues.
Even during the legal tug of war over her job, Malsack-Winkemann was already being targeted by terror investigators.
Officials shadowed her and watched as the judge conversed with Henry XIII in a Berlin restaurant.
Met Prince Reuss, the alleged ringleader.
Another AfD official was also present at the meeting.
Among the accused are at least two other men who are or were active in the AfD at a regional level.
In addition, the Lower Saxony top candidate of the lateral thinker party “Die Basis” for the 2021 federal election, Michael Fritsch.
In the scene they call him the »policeman with heart and brain«.
The 59-year-old was a chief inspector in the Hanover police department.
Until he attracted attention at rallies with crude statements and was suspended.
He spoke of alleged parallels between the Nazi SS and today's "security apparatus."
As early as 2020, Fritsch had returned his identity card and applied for a “citizenship card”, as is customary in the Reich citizen scene, and wanted to have his country of birth changed to “Prussia”.
In the first instance, a court ruled that the police can remove him from the service, he has appealed.
His defense attorney did not want to comment on the terror allegations made by the federal prosecutor.
What makes the group so dangerous, for all their bizarreness, is their deep hatred of the state and the ruling politicians - and their access to weapons.
Several of the accused are said to have owned pistols and rifles, some legally and some illegally.
According to the investigators' findings, some terror suspects are said to have held target practice on the Oschenberg near Bayreuth.
The conspiratorial actions of the group also gave investigators a headache.
Your hard core is said to have equipped itself with a good dozen Iridium satellite phones at a price of a good 1,500 euros each.
They should still work even if the cell phone network breaks down.
Allegedly, the conspirators also signed non-disclosure agreements.
Anyone who violates them faces the death penalty.
Alexander Q. belonged to Prince Reuss's immediate environment, he is the operator of one of the German QAnon channels with the widest reach on Telegram, more than 132,000 subscribers follow him there.
His channel has a harmless name: »Ask us«.
But abbreviations like "WWG1WGA" quickly make it clear to those in the know what it's actually about - the abbreviation stands for the motto of the Q disciples, "Where we go one, we go all".
In his regular voice messages, he railed against the "fascist regime" and continuously spread fake news.
In July 2021, shortly after the flood disaster in the Ahr Valley, he claimed that the flood had washed up 600 children's bodies.
They were imprisoned in underground facilities for years, tortured and finally killed in order to deprive them of adrenochrome.
The metabolite is also used as an antiaging agent.
The tale of children being killed is a conspiracy theory popular among QAnon supporters.
Four weeks before the federal election, on August 28, 2021, the Telegram propagandist published a voice message on his channel and warned of a large-scale scam – like in the USA.
There, in the eyes of QAnon supporters, Donald Trump was only removed from power by election fraud, and their anger was vented in the storming of the Capitol.
Germany too had such a moment of shock, albeit on a much smaller scale.
In the summer of 2020, conspiracy supporters stormed the stairs of the Reichstag building on the sidelines of a major Corona demonstration in Berlin.
A Q-Anon disciple had given the signal to start running: "We're going to get there and get our house back from here today!" For a brief moment, only two police officers stood between the roaring crowd and the entrance gate to the Bundestag.
In the end, reinforcements came and Parliament remained locked.
In recent years, scientists have tried to research why people from all educational and professional backgrounds believe in stories that appear absurd and far from reality at first glance.
In recent years, scientists have tried to research why people from different levels of education believe in stories that appear absurd to others at first glance.
Social psychologist Pia Lamberty distinguishes misinformation and disinformation from broader conspiracy narratives.
People are particularly susceptible to fake news if they have neither the capacity nor the motivation to deal with a topic in depth.
The simpler or more emotional the answers, the easier they caught on.
The belief in complete conspiracy narratives, on the other hand, has more to do with one's own identity and psychological phenomena, with a general distrust of "powerful" people such as politicians or scientists, for example.
From this, the conviction can grow that everything bad that happens in society is the result of secret planning by individuals or groups.
Lamberty describes the terrorist group that has now been exposed as "extremely dangerous" precisely because of its composition (see interview on page XY).
The retreat of many people into the digital world during the pandemic has increased the following of conspiracy fiction.
In the relevant channels and networks, one found one's peers and rocked one's fantasies, a corrective through counter-opinion or comparison of facts often did not take place.
The war in Ukraine and the ensuing economic crisis reinforced this development.
Crises act like catalysts for a fundamental criticism of the system.
»What is decisive for the success of a conspiracy story is not its truth content, but its potential to plausibly resolve contradictions«, writes the neuroscientist and psychiatrist Philipp Sterzer in his book »The Illusion of Reason«.
The result is the polarization of society, with the part that rejects the political system and its representatives becoming more and more noticeable.
A development that the British-US American economist and Nobel Prize winner Angus Deaton is currently identifying for the entire West.
It has to do with the declining growth in recent decades, says Deaton.
The younger ones no longer have any prospects, and their skepticism about democracy is growing.
As with every social movement, extremist groups develop on the fringes who believe that they can only achieve their goals with violence.
In the 1968 period it was groups like “2.
June" or then the RAF, among the Salafists were Islamist terrorist groups.
And so it was only a matter of time before radical squads developed from the environment of the system-critical movements, the Reich citizens, corona skeptics and lateral thinkers, for whom the protest on the street or on the Internet was far too little.
The increasing willingness to use violence in the milieu has been apparent for some time.
In the course of the pandemic, the tone in the relevant telegram channels had become increasingly martial.
There was talk of the "overthrow of the ruling criminal regime," of "revenge," which would be "cruel": "In the end, they will all hang."
As early as May 2021, the North Rhine-Westphalian Ministry of the Interior warned that such violent digital fantasies could sooner or later "lead to the establishment of terrorist structures".
The Office for the Protection of the Constitution is increasingly smuggling “virtual agents” into chat groups: fake profiles who pretend to belong to the scene in order to see if words become deeds.
But the sheer number of channels makes it impossible for the authorities to have all potential violent criminals on the screen.
Radical milieus, who had long marched separately, also came together on the streets.
Right-wing extremists and Reich citizens, Pegida supporters and AfD fans, esoterics and opponents of vaccination.
Lately it has hardly played a role anymore whether it was against the anti-corona measures of politics, the course of the government in the Ukraine war or the skyrocketing prices.
What united them was their rejection of "those up there."
Speakers chanted from the stages of the demonstrations that once again "the Reichstag had to be swept through" and that the deputies should be replaced.
That the federal ministers were crazy or "just mercenaries" who were waging an economic war against the German people.
That "resistance" was needed, which the police should join.
It seemed like longing for a putsch.
Some followed their longing even before Prince Reuss and his guard planned the overthrow.
Several months ago, a group from the Reich citizen and lateral thinker milieu made plans to kidnap Minister of Health Karl Lauterbach - in front of the camera, live on a talk show.
The code word of the action: »Klabautermann«.
According to the investigators, the SPD politician's bodyguards were to be eliminated with machine gun shots, after which the government was to be forced to resign.
According to a detention order by the Federal Court of Justice, the troops wanted to get the blessing for the overthrow from Russia.
Emissaries should cross the Baltic Sea to Kaliningrad by ship and then ask for an audience in the Kremlin – with Vladimir Putin personally.
Five alleged members of the cell are in custody.
Crazy Dangerous or Dangerously Crazy?
What is certain is that the troops already had weapons and were trying to get hold of more.
An undercover investigator from the Rhineland-Palatinate State Criminal Police Office had posed as an arms dealer
Two cases from Baden-Württemberg show how unpredictable the threat that lurks in such milieus.
In April, the police wanted to confiscate a weapon from a Reich citizen ideologue, who had been banned from owning it.
The public prosecutor had noticed the man because of confused letters in which he described the Federal Republic as a "company" that was not entitled to sovereign rights, a widespread conspiracy tale among Reich citizens.
When the police arrived in Boxberg-Bobstadt to search the house, the man fired several dozen shots from a fully automatic rifle, injuring two officers.
On the property of the Reich citizen, the investigators found a kind of walk-in armory, and a machine gun was set up in the living room.
A few weeks earlier, a citizen of the Reich had apparently deliberately knocked over a police officer during a traffic check in southern Baden.
He explained to the magistrate that they had no right to arrest him, that the judge lacked "legal capacity".
The authorities had long underestimated the movement of the »Reich citizens and self-governers«.
Many ridiculed them as harmless crackpots handling fancy ID cards and proclaiming kingdoms.
But dangerous?
It's going ok.
In the meantime, the perspective has changed completely.
The ideological obstinacy and irrationality make the citizens of the Reich particularly dangerous, says a high-ranking investigator.
A man whose radicalization took place on the open stage is Maximilian Eder.
The investigators also count him to the terrorist group around Heinrich XIII.
Prince Reuss.
He is said to have received 50,000 euros from him to further upgrade the group's "military arm".
However, it is unclear what he actually used the money for, internally colleagues accused him of having squandered it.
Eder, now 63 years old, was a colonel in the Bundeswehr. In 1999 he led a Bavarian armored infantry battalion to Kosovo, the Bundeswehr's first military operation.
Before retiring in autumn 2016, he also served for a time with the elite association KSK.
In der Pandemie wurde der Mann mit dem Schnauzbart zu einer der Führungsfiguren der radikalen Proteste gegen die Regierung und ihre Anti-Corona-Maßnahmen.
Bei einer Querdenken-Demo forderte er, KSK-Kämpfer sollten in Berlin mal »ordentlich aufräumen«. Die Impfpflicht für Soldaten bezeichnete er als »Verbrechen gegen die Menschlichkeit«.
Als im Juli 2021 ein Hochwasser in Rheinland-Pfalz das Ahrtal überflutete, gerierten sich Eder und seiner Mittstreiter als Helfer in Not. Der Oberst a.D. trat vor Ort in Uniform auf und unterschrieb mit führenden Köpfen der Querdenken-Bewegung offiziell anmutende Einsatzbefehle. Die vermeintlichen Helfer richteten sich in Ahrweiler in einer ehemaligen Schule ein. Eder bezeichnete sich als »Führer Kommandozentrale« – der nun ebenfalls festgenommene Ex-Elitesoldat Peter Wörner als »Chef des Stabes«.
Doch statt zu helfen, störte die Truppe im Hochwassergebiet nur. Am Ende ließ die Stadt die Schule räumen. Eder erhielt einen Strafbefehl in Höhe von 3500 Euro wegen unbefugten Tragens von Uniformen.
Der pensionierte Offizier radikalisierte sich immer weiter. In einem am 9. November veröffentlichten Video propagierte er in tiefstem Bayerisch den Umsturz. Eder steht in dem Clip mitten im Wald, in Bundeswehr-Flecktarn, und rüttelt an einem Felsen. Wenn »ein paar wenige Entschlossene« anpackten, könne man auch das System zum Wackeln bringen, sagt er. All das werde nicht mehr lange dauern, orakelt der Oberst a.D., »das wird vor Weihnachten sein«. Nun sitzt auch er in Untersuchungshaft.
Vieles von dem, was die mutmaßliche Terrorgruppe geplant haben soll, wirkt wie aus einem bösen Fiebertraum. Neben einem militärischen, soll sie auch einen politischen Arm gehabt haben, den sogenannten »Rat« – eine Art Schattenregierung.
Über einige Kabinettsposten scheint die Gruppe sich bereits einig geworden zu sein. So war Heinrich XIII. Prinz Reuß als Staatsoberhaupt vorgesehen, die Richterin und ehemalige AfD-Bundestagsabgeordnete Malsack-Winkemann als Justizministerin.
Doch wie im wirklichen Leben, scheint es auch im Schattenkabinett der verhinderten Putschisten Zoff um Macht und Posten gegeben zu haben. Umstritten war den Ermittlungen zufolge etwa die Leitung des Finanzressorts: Eine potenzielle Anwärterin, die einige Kameraden gerne im »Rat« gesehen hätten, missfiel offenbar Prinz Reuß. Der als »Außenminister« vorgesehene Kandidat wäre lieber Finanzminister geworden.
In ihren außenpolitischen Ambitionen war die Gruppe bis zu ihrer Verhaftung nicht sehr erfolgreich. Ein Versuch, sich von Russland den Segen zum Staatsstreich geben zu lassen, scheiterte jedenfalls. Heinrich XIII. Prinz Reuß und dessen aus Kaliningrad stammende Freundin Vitalia B. sollen zwar im russischen Generalkonsulat in Leipzig vorstellig geworden sein, laut Bundesanwaltschaft gebe es aber bislang keine Hinweise, dass die Russen »auf sein Ansinnen positiv reagiert haben«.
Der Irrsinn der Politsekte kannte kaum Grenzen. Die Gruppe glaubte fest ein angebliches internationales Geheimbündnis, die »Allianz«. Sehnsüchtig wartete sie darauf, dass diese ihnen zu Hilfe eilt und die oberen Ebenen der Bundesrepublik »abräumt« – und sie dann den Rest des Landes umwälzen könnten, notfalls durch »die Tötung von Systemvertretern«, wie es im Haftbefehl heißt.
Auch eher außergewöhnliche Posten hatten die Verschwörer in ihrer Schattenregierung bereits besetzt. Das Amt der Beauftragten für »Spiritualität und Heilkunde« sollte eine Ärztin aus Niedersachsen übernehmen, die der Gruppe außerdem 20.000 Euro aus ihrem Vermögen überlassen hatte. Und für die »Transkommunikation« war eine Astrologin aus dem Landkreis Bergstraße zuständig.
Auf ihrer Webseite bot sie Prognosen für die Zukunft an. Die kommenden Jahre würden eine Zeit »des großen Umbruchs, sowohl wirtschaftlich, medizinisch als auch politisch«, prophezeite sie. Doch wenn man »das richtige zum richtigen Zeitpunkt am richtigen Ort« tue, dann könne »nichts schiefgehen«. Am Mittwoch schickte auch sie ein Ermittlungsrichter hinter Gitter.
For the Federal Criminal Police Office and the Federal Public Prosecutor General, the anti-terror operation was an unprecedented tour de force.
The state security officers only had a few weeks for an investigation on a scale that has probably never happened before in Germany.
More than 3,000 police officers from the BKA, federal police and state authorities had to be coordinated in order to be able to access the site at the same time early in the morning.
It had to be determined very minutely which officer would be where, what he had to do, how he could be reached.
In the end the mission was successful.
At 6:48 a.m. all the conspirators were arrested.