Prince Heinrich XIII and the Plot to Overthrow Germany’s Authorities

The crenelated looking lodge of Prince Heinrich XIII of Reuss sits atop a steep hill, searching over houses laced with snow and Christmas lights in Dangerous Lobenstein. Well-liked with the native mayor and plenty of close by villagers, the prince spent his weekends within the spa city, giving an aristocratic aptitude to this sleepy nook of rural japanese Germany.

However there was a darker aspect to his idyll.

Heinrich XIII, prosecutors and intelligence officers say, additionally used his lodge to host conferences the place he and a band of far-right co-conspirators plotted to overthrow the German authorities and execute the chancellor. Within the basement, the group saved weapons and explosives. Within the forest that sloped beneath the lodge, they generally held goal follow.

Final week the Waidmannsheil lodge, a three-hour drive south of Berlin within the state of Thuringia, was certainly one of 150 targets raided by safety forces in certainly one of postwar Germany’s greatest counterterrorist operations. By Friday, 23 members of the cell had been detained throughout 11 German states and 31 others positioned below investigation. The police found troves of arms and army tools in addition to an inventory of 18 politicians and journalists deemed to be enemies.

Prince Heinrich XIII, 71, a well-off descendant of a 700-year-old noble household, could seem an unlikely ringleader of such a terrorist plot. However, prosecutors say, he was designated by his co-conspirators to develop into head of state in a post-coup regime.

Nostalgic for the pre-1918 German empire, when his ancestors reigned over a state in japanese Germany, he had brazenly embraced a conspiracy concept that has gained momentum in far-right circles: that Germany’s postwar republic is just not a sovereign nation however an organization arrange by the Allies after World Struggle II.

Followers of this conspiracy concept name themselves Reichsbürger, or Residents of the Reich. And there are numerous them in southeastern Thuringia, the state the place the Nazis first gained energy domestically greater than 90 years in the past, earlier than happening to ascertain the Third Reich.

Right now the state’s greatest political power is the far-right Various for Germany occasion, or AfD — certainly one of whose former lawmakers was arrested as a part of the prince’s alleged plot final week.

However it’s the Reichsbürger who’ve introduced Dangerous Lobenstein probably the most notoriety, to the chagrin of native hoteliers and vintners in search of to draw vacationers to the realm, the place stone buildings and medieval church spires dot rolling landscapes of pine forests and lakes.

“They maintain us fairly busy,” stated Andree Burkhardt, a neighborhood councilman. “However I may by no means have imagined we had a scene right here that was that militant.”

At any time when Mr. Burkhardt and his fellow council members arrange a sales space on the native market to listen to locals’ considerations, they find yourself going through a stream of verbal abuse from folks insisting he’s working for a rustic that doesn’t exist.

“They yell at us and say: ‘We aren’t Germans. We aren’t in an actual German state! We’re only a department of a GmbH!’” he stated, referring to the German acronym for a restricted legal responsibility firm.

However the Reichsbürger appeared like solely a neighborhood nuisance till Heinrich XIII appeared on the scene.

The prince pursued his purpose of restoring Germany’s imperial Reich on a number of fronts, and in a approach that nearly appeared like he believed his fantasy realm already existed.

The editor of Dangerous Lobenstein’s native newspaper, Peter Hagen, first discovered that the village had a prince in April 2021, when residents began telling him about unusual marketing campaign posters plastered on the streets beneath the Waidmannsheil lodge, urging residents to run for elections with the “Reuss election fee.”

There have been no official elections on the time.

Mr. Hagen grew extra suspicious this previous summer time after he adopted Heinrich XIII and one other native Reichsbürger determine to a municipal workplace, which the mayor on the time had allowed them to make use of for a lecture known as “An data occasion on the BRD GmbH” — an acronym for the Federal Republic of Germany, Included.

The title clearly implied a connection to Reichsbürger beliefs. However when Mr. Hagen arrived, the organizers refused to start their assembly, and he was not in a position to hearken to the lecture.

A way of unease in Dangerous Lobenstein started to develop in July, when a letter arrived in folks’s mailboxes. It was punctuated with exclamation factors and capital letters, urging them to make use of a web site to register for citizenship below the Home of Reuss. (Noble titles had been abolished after World Struggle I, however many erstwhile royal households avidly monitor their lineage.)

“Do you even have the sensation that one thing on this nation isn’t proper?” the letter learn. “Do you know that you simply truly should not in possession of any citizenship, that you’re truly stateless and possess no rights?”

Dangerous Lobenstein is residence to six,000 folks, and a few say it feels extra like a village than a city. Everybody is aware of one another, and the one cafe there sells out of pastries and occasional by midday. Inside hours of receiving the letter, Mr. Burkhardt, the native councilman, realized he was not the one one who obtained it — everybody had.

He spoke to Mr. Hagen, and after buying and selling what they’d seen or heard, Mr. Burkhardt started to really feel uneasy. “I assumed: Perhaps we should always have this regarded into. So we truly reported it to the home intelligence company. They informed us: ‘We’re on the case.’ And I believe truthfully, they took it extra severely than I did.”

Intelligence officers had been watching the prince because the fall of 2021, and what they had been discovering was much more sinister: The group of co-conspirators round Heinrich XIII included present and former troopers from the elite particular forces, cops, military reservists and others with hyperlinks to the army who had labored out concrete plans and even potential dates for a coup, officers stated.

Already twice this 12 months the group appeared able to act — as soon as in mid-March and as soon as in September, placing safety companies on excessive alert, however every time it postponed, intelligence officers stated.

The prince recruited help not solely in far-right circles near the army. He additionally sought allies amongst fellow aristocrats, touring to Austria and Switzerland to court docket German-speaking the Aristocracy for donations to finance his plot, officers accustomed to his travels stated. With the cash he collected, his group purchased satellite tv for pc telephones to speak off the grid throughout and after the deliberate coup. The telephones had been later discovered on the lodge through the raid.

Heinrich XIII additionally made contact with Russian diplomats, aided by a youthful Russian girlfriend, who has been recognized by prosecutors solely as Vitalia B. A number of occasions, she facilitated conferences, although prosecutors say they’d no proof of a Russian response.

Within the wake of the assault, Germany’s inside minister plans to tighten gun legal guidelines to make it more durable for extremists to entry weapons.

It’s unclear when and the way Heinrich XIII was first radicalized, intelligence officers say. He had been residing within the rich Westend suburb of Frankfurt, the place he labored as an actual property dealer and advisor.

By the point he began spending common weekends in Dangerous Lobenstein final 12 months, he was already deep contained in the Reichsbürger motion. However his antisemitic tendencies and curiosity in conspiracy theories are nicely documented.

In January 2019, he gave a lecture on the WorldWebForum in Zurich titled “Expertise the rise and fall of the blue-blooded elite.” Within the 15-minute speech, he railed towards the Rothschild household and claimed World Struggle I used to be compelled on the German kaiser by worldwide monetary pursuits — each widespread antisemitic canine whistles — insisting that fashionable democratic Germany was simply an phantasm.

“Ever since Germany surrendered on the eighth of Might, Germany has by no means been sovereign once more,” Prince Heinrich XIII stated in his speech, referring to the day of its defeat in World Struggle II. “It was made into an administrative construction of the allies within the so-called united economic system entity, Federal Republic of Germany — in different phrases, a business construction.”

It was speeches like this that started to alienate him from relations of the Home of Reuss. The top of the Reuss household, a distant cousin who, like all male heirs to the Reuss throne, can be named Heinrich, known as him “a confused previous man” and identified that even when his coup had been profitable, he was solely seventeenth in line for the throne.

“Meaning 16 of us must die earlier than it’s his flip,” he stated, including that what had propelled his distant cousin into his world of conspiracy was in all probability years of embitterment with the German courts.

After German reunification, Heinrich XIII spent years preventing authorized battles to regain possession of household manors and lodges that had been nationalized within the former Communist East Germany. “He by no means obtained any land restitutions,” the pinnacle of the Reuss household stated, although the prince did handle to get again a few of his household’s furnishings and artwork.

In the end, Heinrich XIII had to purchase again the lodge, ornately embellished with its carved stone boars and a gothic-looking tower.

Many on this far-flung city of former Communist East Germany share his sense of nostalgia — albeit for a really totally different type of previous.

Mr. Burkhardt stated he was disturbed by what number of native sympathizers of Reichsbürger beliefs expressed a eager for the times of Communist Germany and disdained the present German authorities, which is discredited of their eyes.

One native shopkeeper, who declined to supply her identify, stated she appreciated the prince — that he appeared “noble.” She was not sure whether or not the Reichsbürger plot to make use of violence was proper or not. “However I believe numerous us right here have this sense,” she stated. “It’s that, nicely — one thing right here has to occur.”

Such sentiment has grown stronger because the pandemic, when conspiracy theories started to mushroom. Now, going through an power disaster and the crushing blow of inflation, bitterness in Germany’s poorer japanese areas is rising, and the governing elites could be a simple goal.

Mr. Burkhardt didn’t have any agency estimates for the way many individuals on the town had been energetic supporters of the Reichsbürger motion, but it surely was sufficient, he stated, to make the place stressed.

The raid, he stated, was like a reckoning.

“It was about time,” Mr. Burkhardt stated.

Christopher F. Schuetze contributed reporting from Berlin.