The mega-trial of the putschists who wanted to kill including Olaf Scholz begins

An ex-soldier, a conspiracy theorist, an astrologer and an anti-vaxxer are among the first people to stand trial for the attempted violent overthrow of the German government by self-proclaimed Prince Heinrich XIII in one of the world’s biggest trials of recent German history and which begins on Monday. 27 people are on trial in total, The Guardian reports. The group’s plan also called for the “execution” of some officials, including Chancellor Olaf Scholz.

On Monday, a group of nine people identified as the “military wing” of the group led by self-proclaimed Prince Heinrich XIII, who hails from an old noble family known as the House of Reuss, will be the first to stand trial in the city of Stuttgart for terrorism charges. Nine others, including Reuss, will go on trial in Frankfurt on May 21. The other trial targeting the rest of the putschists begins on June 18.

The accused are suspected of being the leaders of a group fueled by conspiratorial and far-right ideologies, which planned to invade the Bundestag, the lower house of the German parliament in Berlin, to detain deputies there and overthrow the government.

They will be tried for “participation in a terrorist organization” during about fifty hearings.

If the coup had succeeded, Henry XIII would have been the head of a new German state

The Frankfurt court will in particular try the alleged leaders of the group: a septuagenarian aristocrat and businessman, Henry XIII, known as Prince Reuss and descendant of an aristocratic family from the Land of Thuringia.

In his castle in Bad Lobenstein, most of the clandestine meetings took place to think through the whole plan, AFP notes.

Considered “the most important matter concerning state security in recent history” of Germany, according to the Spiegel weekly, the investigation delves into the “bizarre and delusional world” of a group fed “by Internet myths, hatred and belief in cosmic forces.”

“A mixture that apparently radicalized them more and more – and made them dream of an attack on the Bundestag, ‘purges’ and military courts-martial,” writes the weekly.

The network’s aim “was to forcibly eliminate the existing public order in Germany and replace it with a new one,” according to prosecutors.

“Convinced that Germany is governed by a parallel state” or state within a state, which represents a nebulous entity that, according to conspiracy theorists, acts behind the scenes of the government, the accused, steeped in “numerous conspiracy myths” “deeply reject institutions and democracy,” he says the parquet floor.

Prince Reuss, an anti-Semitic businessman, founded the group with the express desire of the coup. If the coup was successful, he would be declared provisional head of a new German state, which would redraw the country according to the 1937 borders.

Russia’s shadow hovers over the coup attempt

A Russian woman named “Vitalia B” is suspected of having “put the aristocrat in touch with the Russian Consulate General in Leipzig and accompanied him there in June 2022”, and Henry XIII tried to secure the support of the Russian authorities, even though at the time of the group’s dismantling, the Kremlin denied any “Russian involvement”.

The putschists had hundreds of firearms

According to federal prosecutors, the group planned to enter the Reichstag Parliament building with armed support to detain members of the Bundestag with the intention of “overturning the system”. The putschists wanted to remove by force the existing state order and replace it with their own government.

They had been hatching the plans since August 2021 until they were discovered in December 2022 in a series of large-scale anti-terrorist raids involving thousands of officers searching 150 properties in 11 German states as well as abroad.

The members, many from Germany’s far-right Reichsbürger movement, had access to “a massive arsenal of weapons”, prosecutors said, including 380 firearms, 350 melee weapons, nearly 500 other weapons and 148,000 rounds of ammunition, at which went by the code name “candy”.

Olaf Scholz, on the list of people to be executed

Among their highly detailed plans was a hit list drawn up by ex-elite soldier and survival instructor Peter Wörner, nicknamed “The Wolf”, which included the name of Chancellor Olaf Scholz, as well as and two television personalities, Markus Lanz and Sandra Maischberger, and CDU leader Friedrich Merz.

Who are the members of the group and who would have been part of the new German government

In preparation for the new “regime” in which he expected to play a role, Wörner commissioned a tailor to make him a “Nazi-style” soldier’s uniform.

The coup plotters paid a Swiss criminal gang around €140,000 (£120,000) for weapons and planned to search “underground children’s prisons” where they believed a secret “world government” was conducting experiments on children.

Thomas T, together with the group’s future “minister of transcommunications”, Hildegard Leiding, also 60, a member of the right-wing AfD party and an astrologer, allegedly sought candidates for the “future government” on a “spiritual basis”, based on their dates of birth, prosecutors said.

A chef from Austria, mandated to cook healthy food for the new regime, was also allegedly involved.

Melanie Ritter, 57, “a doctor specializing in the method of predicting the future with the help of eggs” and a skeptic of the anti-Covid vaccine, who had expected to become health minister in the wake of the coup, will also be tried alongside T. state.

According to the indictment, former Lt. Col. Rüdiger von Pescatore, 70, interpreted the death of Queen Elizabeth in September 2022 as “the signal for an Allied attack on Germany” that would mark “X-Day,” the date of the coup, according to the messages which he wrote in two of the network’s various chat groups.