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Prince Heinrich XIII of Reuss, the obscure aristocrat who wanted to become German chancellor, and eight men and women who planned to bring him into power by violently overthrowing the government, went on trial on Tuesday in Frankfurt.<\/p>\n
Nearly a year and a half after a spectacular nationwide raid involving 3,000 police officers at 150 locations that the authorities say foiled a bizarre, far-right plan to seize power<\/a>, the prince<\/a> and the plotters will start facing justice. It is expected to be one of the most complex court cases since West Germany tried Auschwitz concentration camp commanders in the 1960s.<\/p>\n In a large, gray temporary courtroom hastily built on the outskirts of Frankfurt, the nine accused saw each other for the first time since late 2022, when most of them were arrested. In that time, prosecutors have analyzed thousands of files and chat exchanges and hours of witness testimony to prepare a case they hope will show the grave danger posed by the would-be insurrectionists, who included several retired elite soldiers, a police officer and a former federal far-right lawmaker.<\/p>\n Tobias Engelstetter, one of the four federal prosecutors arguing the case in Frankfurt, read the bizarre details behind the charges in an opening statement that lasted longer than two hours.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Members of the group, who called themselves the \u201cUnited Patriots,\u201d believed the government was run by pedophilic, illegitimate politicians who had access to a network of underground military bases. The plotters believed in the existence of a secret alliance, prosecutors say, consisting of sympathetic foreign intelligence services, including ones belonging to the United States and Russia, would help the group overthrow the deep state once a signal was given.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n The accused are part of a group within the Reichsb\u00fcrger movement, which believes the modern German state is illegitimate. <\/p>\n \u201cThe militant \u2018Reichsb\u00fcrger\u2019 are driven by hatred of our democracy,\u201d Nancy Faeser, Germany\u2019s interior minister, said in a statement on Tuesday. \u201cOur security services will continue their crackdown until we have fully exposed and dismantled militant \u2018Reichsb\u00fcrger\u2019 structures.\u201d<\/p>\n Frankfurt\u2019s mega trial is just one of three proceedings arising from the plot<\/a>. With 27 people indicted by federal prosecutors, the core group of alleged plotters was too big to fit into a single courtroom.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Last month, a trial started in Stuttgart focusing on nine men who could be categorized as making up the military arm of the operation. Next month in a high-security courtroom in Munich, eight suspected plotters, who federal prosecutors say provided financial support, will go on trial. A 27th suspect died awaiting trial. It could take years before the trials yield verdicts, experts say.<\/p>\n The nine defendants in Frankfurt represent the coup\u2019s leadership, prosecutors say, arguably making this the most important of the trials. Several of the men scheduled to appear in Frankfurt on Tuesday were charged with founding the terrorist group; others were members of the leadership council, which was designated to form a cabinet of ministers who answered to the prince once the coup was been successful, prosecutor say. Two women facing the five-judge panel are accused of seeking support from Russia for the coup.<\/p>\n \u201cThis trial can provide insights into the state of preparations, but also into the alleged terrorist group\u2019s links to Russia,\u201d said Jan Rathje, who studies the Reichsb\u00fcrger movement for a nongovernmental group that monitors extremism and the far right.<\/p>\n But as idiosyncratic as their beliefs were, the authorities say, members of the group posed a real danger. The authorities found 380 firearms and 350 other weapons such as knives, axes and clubs. They also found 148,000 rounds of ammunition, explosives, military helmets and protective equipment, along with gold and cash valued at half a million euros, roughly $543,000.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n R\u00fcdiger von Pescatore and Maximilan Eder, two of the founders of the group, were retired army officers; Michael F., as he is identified by the court in keeping with Germany\u2019s strict privacy laws, was to be interior minister in the post-coup regime and was a chief inspector of the criminal police, prosecutors say. Birgit Malsack-Winkemann was a judge who was elected in 2017 to the federal Parliament on a far-right ticket and served for four years. <\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n The defendants adhered to a worldview consisting of QAnon-type mythology and far-right historical revisionism of the German empire as it existed before World War I. The prince had long been angry over what he considered lost ancestral lands, and many of the former army officers believed the government was badly mismanaging the country.<\/p>\n During the summer of 2021, according to prosecutors, the group planned to overthrow the government by entering the Parliament and arresting top politicians. A video showing Chancellor Olaf Scholz as a captive would broadcast the successful coup to the country. Then, 286 \u201chomeland security brigades\u201d would be responsible for keeping the population controlled, even if that meant killing or imprisoning people who rebelled against the new leadership, prosecutors said.<\/p>\n To plan the insurrection, the group\u2019s \u201ccouncil\u201d met regularly in an old hunting castle belonging to the prince, the prosecution charges.<\/p>\n But group members started turning against one another in fall 2022, when the council and military arm started favoring separate strategies, according to prosecutors. While Mr. von Pescatore was designing uniforms based on old Wehrmacht uniforms, the prince increasingly worried that some of the group\u2019s documents were becoming too widely distributed. <\/span>And some of its former army officers had contacted active-duty army generals, who rejected their advances and alerted authorities. <\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Although did not found the movement that promised him national leadership, the prince played an important leadership role early on, prosecutors say. Because of his family\u2019s pretensions to the German line of Kaisers<\/a>, whose reign as German rulers ended with the cataclysm that was World War I, he was the ideal figurehead for the group, who believed only a member of true royalty could sign a lasting peace treaty with foreign governments.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n