By Rachel More
BERLIN (Reuters) – German police have arrested eight suspected members of a right-wing militant group driven by racist ideology and conspiracy theories who had been training in warfare for the downfall of the modern German state, prosecutors said on Tuesday.
News of the arrests came as a 450-strong police operation was under way to dismantle the group, named by prosecutors as “Saechsische Separatisten”, or Saxony Separatists, which has the abbreviation SS, the same as the Nazi party’s elite militia.
“Our security authorities have thus thwarted at an early stage militant coup plans by right-wing terrorists, who were longing for a Day X to attack people and our state with armed force,” Interior Minister Nancy Faeser said in a statement.
Spiegel Online reported that one of the suspects was a politician for the nationalist Alternative for Germany (AfD) in eastern Germany.
This would be the second coup plot uncovered in Germany in recent years.
The so-called “Reichsbuerger” movement was exposed in 2022, led by a would-be prince with ambitions to overthrow the state and install a caretaker government, in a case that shocked Germany with its detailed network and planning.
The group targeted in Tuesday’s operation was formed no later than November 2020, the federal prosecutor’s office said in a statement.
“It is a militant group of 15 to 20 individuals whose ideology is characterised by racist, anti-Semitic and partially apocalyptic ideas,” the statement added.
Convinced that Germany is nearing collapse, with the fall of government and society prophesied for an undetermined “Day X”, the group had been training to use force to establish a new system in the country’s east inspired by Nazism, according to investigators.
“If necessary, unwanted groups of people are supposed to be removed from the area by means of ethnic cleansing,” the statement said.
PARAMILITARY TRAINING
Prosecutors said the suspects had completed paramilitary training, focusing on urban warfare, firearms handling, nocturnal marching and patrolling.
The group had also procured military hardware, such as camouflage fatigues, combat helmets, gas masks and bullet-proof vests.
The Polish Security Agency said it had detained the suspected ringleader and founding member, Joerg S., 23, in the Polish border town of Zgorzelec after working with German authorities for months.
German prosecutors identified some of the others arrested as Joern S., Karl K. and Norman T., in keeping with German judicial practice of not using family names.
Two of the suspects belong to a family of known far-right militants in Austria, Spiegel Online reported.
Seven of the suspects were captured in and around the eastern cities of Leipzig, Dresden and Meissen.
Spiegel reported that one of the suspects, who it identified as Kurt H., was an AfD politician in the eastern state of Saxony, where the party only just missed winning a state election in Sept.
He is an elected member of the city council in Grimma, near Leipzig, according to the city’s website. Spiegel also said he has been treasurer of the Saxon AfD youth organisation ‘Junge Alternative’ since October.
The AfD’s national office and local Leipzig branch did not immediately respond to a Reuters request for comment.
Spiegel said Kurt H.’s defence lawyer was initially unavailable for comment.
The eight face charges of participating in a domestic terrorist organisation. Some are to be prosecuted as minors and adolescents. They suspects were expected to be brought before a judge later in the day.
(Additional reporting by Alan Charlish in Warsaw and Madeline Chambers; Editing by Miranda Murray, Alex Richardson, Alexandra Hudson)
