- In early December, German police uncovered a plot by far-right conspirators to mount a coup.
- Germany’s image of political stability has caused many observers to downplay the revelation.
- But that underestimates the spread of the group’s anti-constitutional worldview in Germany.
At a time when Germany is almost universally viewed as a safe haven for liberal democracy, claims that it risks a return to the political chaos that engulfed it in the 20th century can seem vastly overstated.
It is widely acknowledged that the electoral appeal of the far-right Alternative for Germany, or AfD, to about 10% of German voters is a matter of great concern. Yet most observers point to the fact that the overwhelming majority of Germans continue to support parties that respect democratic norms as proof that Germany’s constitutional order is not under existential threat.
This image of political stability, though not unjustified, caused many observers to downplay the revelation in early December that German police had uncovered an organized plot by a network of far-right conspirators to mount a coup.
As news emerged that 3,000 police officers had been deployed to arrest several dozen members of this network, many took the eclectic background of its leading figures — including a member of the old aristocracy, Prince Heinrich XIII of Reuss, as well as an opera singer and a former AfD Bundestag member who is now a serving judge — to mean that they were merely harmless cranks.
Their lack of care when it came to preparing to overthrow the German government was further taken as evidence that this plot never represented a threat to the state.
Markus Schreiber/AP
Yet even as jokes over a plan to topple Chancellor Olaf Scholz and replace him with an obscure aristocrat spread across social media, strong evidence that German investigators had good reason to dismantle this network came to the surface.
The involvement of former senior military officers who had served in an elite parachute regiment and special forces units was a disturbing sign of the contempt for democratic institutions that can be found within the military. Both units have already been the subject of previous investigations concerning far-right extremism in their ranks and the disappearance of weapons from their armories.
The willingness of some in the media to downplay the threat posed by these coup plotters also indicates a tendency to underestimate the extent to which their anti-constitutional worldview has spread in Germany among wider social milieus that overlap with the AfD’s base.
Though the term “Reichsburger,” or “Imperial Citizen,” only came into use in the 1980s, the idea that Germany’s postwar constitution is supposedly illegitimate because it was adopted under the oversight of French, British, and US occupying armies has been a recurring theme among the German far-right since the foundation of the Federal Republic of Germany in 1949.
After reunification in 1990, this form of anti-constitutional ideology spread from an older cadre of activists to neo-Nazi skinhead subcultures that drew alienated young people into the ideological orbit of the far right. In a society where the Basic Law protecting human rights at the heart of the constitution is revered as the fundamental source of liberty and stability, such vehement rejection of its legitimacy represents a profound attack on the structural foundations of Germany’s social order.
Starting in the early 2000s, growing interest in the “Reichsburger” movement’s anti-constitutional worldviews has led thousands of people across Germany to openly declare that they would not abide by any law enacted after 1930, a trend that should have been taken more seriously by successive German governments than they did at the time.
Though there were a handful of violent incidents, most people who embraced the “Reichsburger” ideology expressed their opposition to the state through tax evasion, pointless court cases based on 19th-century laws or the use of self-created ID cards rather than official documents. That led many commentators and government officials to downplay the threat this movement might pose.
REUTERS/Fabian Bimmer
Even as German intelligence services focused on other security threats among jihadist movements or the radical left, the foundations of “Reichsburger” thought gradually percolated through to a wider part of the electorate that, in the wake of the eurozone and migration crises of the mid-2010s, had become susceptible to far-right rhetoric. These trends also helped the AfD build the voter base that led to its recent electoral breakthroughs, meaning that many of the party’s members and MPs openly embraced such anti-constitutional stances.
Anger over COVID-19 lockdowns subsequently drew many who had not previously had contact with the far right to movements dominated by it, such as the “Querdenker,” which denied the risks the pandemic posed. As a result, by 2021, views that had once been considered the preserve of an eccentric “Reichsburger” fringe were being entertained by a wider cross-section of the German public.
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Now that the anti-constitutionalism of the “Reichsburger” movement has been adopted by some AfD MPs and people from all walks of life, the fact that far-right activists could convince themselves that an armed assault on the Bundestag by a handful of special forces veterans could bring about the Federal Republic’s collapse becomes less surprising.
Even if the coup-plotters themselves only represent a tiny minority of the wider population, such attacks could potentially count on the support of thousands of radicalized Germans in several cities, particularly in regions in eastern Germany, such as Saxony. German police and intelligence services had to take the threat this network represented seriously.
In doing so, the speed with which they moved also reflected bitter lessons learned after underestimating other movements that went on to become the source of instability and bloodshed in postwar Germany. In the 1960s, many radical left-wing activists — such as Andreas Baader, whose Red Army Fraction, or RAF, was also known as the Baader-Meinhof Gang — were initially dismissed as dilettantes cosplaying revolution who could be suppressed without much effort.
This complacency gave the East German Stasi and other Soviet-bloc intelligence services opportunities to reach out to emerging radical networks willing to destabilize the Federal Republic at the time. Only after these groups began to wage increasingly professional bombing and assassination campaigns in cooperation with other transnational terror organizations did West German security services realize how great a risk they posed to the state.
Boris Roessler/picture alliance via Getty Images
Similar blunders by intelligence officials gave neo-Nazi groups, such as Wehrsportgruppe Hoffmann in the early 1980s and the NSU terror group in the 2000s, space to engage in targeted attacks against communities they viewed as enemies of the people. Whether it was the Oktoberfest bombing in 1980 or the assassination of immigrants by members of the NSU two decades later, German security services proved unwilling to take the threat posed by such thuggish groups seriously until it was too late to prevent carnage.
In the case of the NSU, police investigators were themselves prone to racist assumptions in their initial focus on potential rivalries between immigrant diasporas, rather than acknowledging that the source of such attacks might come from the far right.
As intelligence and domestic security services in the United States have also learned in the past few years, fringe groups that might initially seem chaotic and absurd, like QAnon or the Proud Boys, can become ideological incubators for processes of radicalization among a growing segment of the population.
Even if the great majority of voters reject anti-constitutional views that can be used as a pretext for violence against political opponents or the state, a movement that is able to mobilize tens or even hundreds of thousands of people can still do enormous damage to a democracy. A terror network made up of several hundred people who can count on such a support network can inflict the kind of violence that can tip a state over into chaos and even paralysis that becomes difficult to recover from.
The conspirators who assembled around a disgruntled judge and a financially strapped aristocrat were undoubtedly delusional in their belief that they could replace Germany’s constitution with their own authoritarian fantasies. Yet as their predecessors in the RAF and NSU demonstrated, such a terror network does not need to come anywhere near to achieving its goals to have a profoundly destabilizing impact.
Too often analysts assessing threats become distracted by a movement’s aesthetic and ideological absurdities, rather than taking a closer look at the resources it has available and its willingness to use violence to pursue its goals. However silly an Andreas Baader or a Prince Heinrich XIII might appear, in their desperation to turn their fantasies into reality they can still become harbingers of chaos.
Alexander Clarkson is a lecturer in European studies at King’s College London. His research explores the impact that transnational diaspora communities have had on the politics of Germany and Europe after 1945 as well as how the militarization of the European Union’s border system has affected its relationships with neighboring states. His weekly WPR column appears every Wednesday.
