The German government has banned the “Kingdom of Germany,” or Königreich Deutschland, group and arrested four of its leaders.
During operations that began early on Tuesday, 800 police officers in several German states searched properties linked to the organization and the homes of some of its leading members.
German Interior Minister Alexander Dobrindt told reporters in Berlin: “We will take decisive action against those who attack our free democratic basic order.
“The members of this association have created a ‘counter-state’ in our country and built up economic criminal structures.”
Dobrindt said the group’s ideology was based on anti-Semitic conspiracy narratives.
Kingdom of Germany, also known as KRD, was part of the Reichsbürger (citizens of the Reich) movement, which believes the current German state is illegitimate.
The group maintains that Germany remains a monarchy despite the abolition of the position of kaiser, or king, after World War I.
Many members of the Reichsbürger movement refuse to pay taxes or fines and do not recognize the state’s parliament, laws, or courts.
Kingdom of Germany was proclaimed by its leader Peter Fitzek—one of the individuals arrested on Tuesday—in Wittenberg, in the eastern state of Saxony-Anhalt, in 2012.
It claims to have 6,000 members, but the interior ministry said the real number was closer to 1,000.
Not ‘Harmless Nostalgics’
“This is not about harmless nostalgics, as the title of the association might suggest, but about criminal structures, criminal networks. That’s why it’s being banned today,” Dobrindt said.The office of Germany’s federal prosecutor general said four individuals had been arrested based on warrants issued by the investigating judge of the Federal Court of Justice.
Authorities said the arrests took place in the town of Bad Dürkheim, in western Germany, and the districts of Mittelsachsen and Oder-Spree, in eastern Germany.
The prosecutor general’s office said police in Switzerland had also searched the residence of another suspect in the Swiss canton of Solothurn, following a request by the German authorities.
“The KRD considers itself a sovereign state under international law and seeks to extend its claimed ‘national territory’ to the borders of the German Empire of 1871,” the statement reads.
“The group’s goal is to replace the system of the Federal Republic of Germany with its own.”
It is not the first time the German government has taken action against the Reichsbürger movement.
The trial heard that the plotters planned to install Reuss as a caretaker head of state.
Among the other defendants were former army officers Maximilian Eder and Ruediger von Pescatore, and former judge and ex-parliamentarian Birgit Malsack-Winkemann.
The German Empire, referred to as the Second Reich, collapsed after it was defeated by Britain, France, and the United States in World War I.
Kaiser Wilhelm II abdicated in November 1918 and went into exile in the Netherlands, where he lived until his death in 1941.
The Nazi regime under Adolf Hitler was known as the Third Reich, and after it was defeated in 1945, Germany was occupied by the armies of Britain, France, the United States and the Soviet Union.
The western part of the country became the Federal Republic of Germany, and a communist state was set up in the Soviet-occupied east.
Following the collapse of communist East Germany in 1990, the country was united and remains known as the Federal Republic of Germany.
