Just last week the trial against five of those responsible for the attempted coup in Germany began when a new raid in the ‘Reichsbürger’ environment resulted in three more arrests. The federal prosecutor’s office ordered the searches of several buildings and the arrest of two men and a woman arrested in Baden-Württemberg and Lower Saxony on the night of Monday to Tuesday: a woman in the Bodensee district, a man in the Freudenstadt and another man in Lower Saxony, in the Harburg district. This afternoon they will appear before an investigating judge of the Federal Court of Justice in Karlsruhe, who will decide whether to execute the arrest warrants against them or end their arrest. The federal prosecutor accuses the three detainees of belonging to a terrorist organization.
The Prosecutor’s Office has not revealed the identity of the detainees, but the weekly ‘Der Spiegel’ assures that one of them is Johanna F.-J. In the last federal elections, she ran unsuccessfully for the populist and anti-establishment party Die Basis (The Bases). Investigators have concluded that she, among other things, tried to contact Russian President Vladimir Putin and his Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov on behalf of Prince Henry XIII Reuss’s troops. Her expectations included that Russia would be convinced by the group’s alleged coup plans and that would lend its financial and political support to the operation, as stated in legal documents, but there is no record that Russia responded at any time to such requests, or even that it agreed to maintain the expected contacts. This same woman also participated in the so-called ‘Council’, the hard core that sought to overthrow the existing state order.
The other two detainees would be Hans-Joachim H. and Steffen W., who has already given a first preliminary statement before the Federal Court of Justice and remains in pretrial detention. The latter would have acknowledged having handed over to the terrorist organization around 140,000 euros as a donation and have already attended meetings to recruit members and sponsors. It is also suspected that he had a prominent role in the so-called national security company.
Research breakthrough
The fact that the Prosecutor’s Office is reaching possible deals with the five members of the group whose trial is already underway could explain the sudden appearance of new data that makes it possible to expand the list of defendants and order the searches and arrests, which this time have not met violent resistance. Last March, during another raid ordered by the same prosecutors and in the course of this same investigation, a man shot a police officer that he belonged to the search group when he knocked on the door of his house in Reutlingen.
Together with Henry XIII, Prince Reuss, more than two dozen alleged accomplices have already been arrested. The group had planned the “use of military means and violence against representatives of the State.” According to the state of the investigation, the main leader of the group was the former elite soldier Rüdiger von Pescatore, together with Prince Reuss. Other active and retired soldiers and police officers had also joined the terrorist group.
