Modern Germany is no stranger to far-Right plots and conspiracies. In July, Franco Albrecht, a former soldier, was jailed after fraudulently registering as a Syrian refugee and plotting a series of “false flag” assassinations to spark a race war.
Last year, another soldier, a member of Germany’s KSK special forces unit, was put on trial after far-Right material and an impressive buried arsenal were discovered in his home. The year before, part of the KSK was partially disbanded because of fears over far-Right infiltration.
Seemingly lax enforcement – the above soldier was not jailed – and a number of other scandals have combined to create worries of a wider far-Right infiltration of Germany’s Bundeswehr armed forces and security services.
In a country which is deeply ambivalent about all things military and where conscription ended a decade ago, it does not always attract the most politically benign recruits.
As the judge in the trial of the KSK soldier put it: “You don’t find a lot of Greens or leftists in the military”.
The mass arrests at dawn on Wednesday suggest a growing determination by the authorities to stamp out extremist plots. They also reveal the sometimes bizarre diversity of Germany’s far-Right.
The coup plot appears to have centred around Heinrich XIII Prince Reuss, a minor aristocrat who planned to become kaiser in a renewed German Reich.
The idea, it seems, was to restore the German Empire of 1871 to 1918, forged by Otto von Bismarck in a series of 19th-century wars but abolished in the aftermath of the First World War.
Yet Germany’s far-Right is a disparate milieu of delusions. The plot looks to have been linked to the Reichsbürger group, which has as many as 21,000 followers.
While the group is organised enough to have ID cards replete with the flag and crest of Imperial Germany, its ideology is more scattergun. Many members share Heinrich XIII’s obsession with the German Empire, while others insist Adolf Hitler’s Third Reich remains the legitimate state.
They appear to share plenty of traditional far-Right beliefs, including deep-set anti-Semitism but also hold to more modern conspiracies such as the “great replacement”, which claims that elites want to replace white Europeans with minorities.
Pre-war Germany was no stranger to coups, with the Weimar Republic fatally undermined by the fact that most of the Right-wing parties it contained simply did not believe in democracy. Throughout the twenties, there were repeated failed putsches against it, including one by Hitler in 1923.
Today’s plotters do not represent anywhere near the same threat, but they do perhaps reflect the dubious methods by which West Germany was secured in its democracy in a way that Weimar was not.
With the rapid emergence of the Cold War bringing with it a need for a strong West Germany, the United States quickly ditched efforts at de-Nazification and quietly allowed tainted officials back into the civil service and military.
Germany’s security apparatus then spent the Cold War focused intently on the communist threat, to the exclusion of much else.
Such circumstances allowed the far-Right to retain substantial roots in the country, which were only boosted post-1989 by an influx of recruits from the battered and economically marginalised East.
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