German police arrest 25 suspects in plot to overthrow state | Hacker News Reader

German police arrest 25 suspects in plot to overthrow state

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76 pointsrntn61 comments

Yep, they come with the whole shebang of self-issuing passports for their empire, and hoarding weapons for the next insurrection. Their fervor for the German Reich is absolutely comedic to Germans, especially the insistence on it having never ceased to exist. On the other hand their readiness to commit violent crimes (including readily assaulting city officials and law enforcement officers) is justifiably causing concern.

These people behave as though grandpa woke up after a 60 year sleep and he doesn’t know yet that Germany lost the war or that the wall has fallen (like that Germany movie Good Bye Lenin https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Good_Bye,_Lenin! )

It’s the old trope of a family dinner where the eldest suddenly starts reminiscing how great things in the “3rd Reich” were. If I may draw comparisons then I hear that over in the US the Americans then I hear that similar situations are experienced during a thanksgiving dinner, when a certain relative shows up.

Relics from the past that refuse to disappear.

> Their fervor for the German Reich is absolutely comedic to Germans, especially the insistence on it having never ceased to exist.

There are several such groups, but one of the biggest ones has an absolutely comedic rationalisation why the German Reich still exists and "I'm the one in charge, not those other two dozen clowns who have founded their own Reich governments":

They sent a letter to the American embassy. "If you want me to govern Germany on your behalf, don't object".

And the American embassy even sent back a signed confirmation!

Well, they did not. The Reichsbürger sent his letter as registered mail, the embassy's mail department signed its reception, the German post sent back the "we have delivered your registered mail" stub.

Obviously, this news today is grave and doesn't lend itself easily towards comedy, but parts of the movement are really funny in their denial of reality.

This is not so comedic as you may think. The supreme constitutional court clarifies in a judgment of the year 1972: The German Reich survived the collapse of 1945 [...] The Federal Republic of Germany is not the legal successor but as a state identical with the state German Reich. (This can be found in the document WD-3-292-07 of the scientific service of the german parliament https://www.bundestag.de/resource/blob/659208/bb1b8014f97412... )

It's like sovereign citizen movements. Reality doesn't matter, and will be tortured until it works the way they want, where they and only they have the magic words to control it.

In the US, it used to be Senators casually getting nostalgic about the good old days when segregation was still legal and active. They've mostly all died by now.

The Kongo-Müller (1920-1983) interview (Der lachende Mann, DDR, 1966) is worth a watch —— but only at a time when one is otherwise well-disposed towards the innate good-nature of humanity.

I'm really starting to think these fringe "activist" groups are driven by the FSB doing "active measures". Putin cut his teeth as a field agent in Germany supporting fringe groups to destabilize governments. In 2014, it was these types of groups that stormed the Luhansk and Donetsk governments. In 2021, right wing groups attempted to do the same in Washington. Now we see the German version of this in 2022.

The argument against that is that groups of this memetic profile have been documented in the US since the 1960's, and in Deutschland since the 1980's, both of which predate the FSB as such (1995).

On the "for" hand, they could all plausibly be Полезные идиоты (NB loan word from english!) and so it'll be interesting to see whether TFA's "one suspected supporter [who] is from Russia" winds up connected during the prosecution.

The predecessor was certainly highly active in 1960s U.S. though. We know of this from the Mitrokhin revelations.

From https://www.rbth.com/history/334691-inside-mitrokhin-archive...:

> Stashes of arms were maintained in various parts of the [US], ready to be used in the case of an armed conflict.

It would be ironic if pred(FSB) [in line with techniques used by the Tsar's Охрана, pred(pred(FSB))] had been using anti-communist groups to gather and stash arms for their ultimate use! (almost as ironic as a farmer fattening hogs, ultimately for schnitzel?)

Putting on my tinfoil hat, a grand conspiracy theory along these lines would involve the pred(FSB) first cancelling both Kennedy and Хрущёв to prevent rapproachment, then electing Reagan in 1984 to shatter detente and turn the US away from western european democracy, in the hopes he would bring down the state and party (which had a distressing tendency to promote Gorby types?) for which they worked, enabling them, at long last, to install one of their own as leader of the FSU... Nah, that's crazy talk! </tinfoil>

(between the FBI and the KГБ, I almost start to wonder how many truly organic nutjob groups existed in the 1960s US! "Please, no russian — I'm spying!" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3PHLmv4Zzu0 )

no idea if this is the "suspected supporter", but I just read:

> Reuss [71] soll Verbindungen nach Russland haben – seine 39-jährige Lebensgefährtin ist Russin. Über sie soll Reuss Kontakt zu russischen Stellen aufgenommen haben.

The biggest difference between the 2021 riots in the US compared to this events in Germany is that the German group had some military support. Civil disorder are dangerous, but military revolutions tend to be at a distinctly different level. Riots tend to also be a bit more chaotic in their goals and destruction, while planned military operations tend to be more focused and deliberated.

Is it true that the german nutters had qualitatively more military support than the US nutters? After all, the recent sedition verdicts in the US involved ex-military who had established arms caches before, and moved in formation during, their "riot".

The German nutters had people from the Kommando Spezialkräfte, and they were arming themselves with military weapons to be used in the attack.

The US nutters had paramilitary equipment during the riots like Walkie talkies and walked in formation. They were also equipped with bear spray, classified by the prosecutor as a "Deadly or Dangerous Weapon".

I would say there is some qualitative differences between the two, although both were obvious nutters with no connection with reality.

US nutters had also prepositioned rifles (no barrett this time) with their reserve ... but I agree active KSK is a qualitative difference from "Gravy Seals".

Edit: seems like KSK involvement may be less than surprising: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-53237685

Some more qualitative differences:

* the germans allegedly had support from (former?) legislators to produce a plausible plan for breaking into the government chambers.

* the germans not only had planned to use private weapons but had even cased government Kaserne for materiel.

I wonder if it's not much different than what we saw years ago from the far left. Whichever ideological wing isn't in power, fights against the state apparatus. It seems that since the ideological left currently holds most state power, you see far right groups on the attack. When the right had the power, you had far left groups on the attack. Just a dispassionate observation..

The KGB was active in supporting leftwing extremists in the 70s such as Red Army Faction. Guess who was one of the KGB officers in contact with RAF in the late 80s? That's right, none other than Putin.

The modern FSB nurtures contacts on both far left and far right, a long with folks like Tulsi Gabbard.

I think the big lesson for modern Russian active measures is that you can only get so far with leftist intellectuals and intelligencia before they push back (see George Orwell). The militaristic, chauvinistic, and overwhelmingly rural conservatives are a lot easier to ring in nowadays since so many of them have been economically displaced by globalization and alienated by the abandonment of tradition.

Can you provide some evidence that Tulsi Gabbard is somehow compromised by the FSB? That's an extraordinary claim.

This had zero chance of succeeding.

Germany is a federal state with strong separation of power between federal government and local governments with local police forces.

Society is split like elsewhere, but the fringe parties like AFD are at 15% in general election weekly question [1]. This is Don Quixotery.

It can also be seen in the layout of German newspapers: spiegel.de and bild.de have the main article behind a paywall. They don’t do this for important news.

[1] https://www.wahlrecht.de/umfragen/

Edit: updated link

> "spiegel.de and bild.de have the main article behind a paywall. They don’t do this for important news."

As a side note:

This seems to me a weird business model, why pay for unimportant news?

Wouldn't it make more sense to bring important news behind a paywall?

Can someone explain? Thanks!

If you paywall important news, everyone will share free articles instead. Does the birdseed press ever paywall?

Edit: compare https://www.lemonde.fr 's cookie/subscription wall with https://www.thesun.co.uk

Thanks for taking the time to answer. Yet I fail to see how this answers to my question (I must be dumb):

"why paying for unimportant news?"

(edit: I don't get the policy from "Le monde" either. For example I see some important news which are paywalled, while other important news are free. Same for unimportant news. It seems the categorization is quite done at random (at least in what I read today).

If you take "Les echos" it's clearer, important news are paywalled, which I find more logical as a business model.)

I won't speak for Le Monde's commercial side, but think the concept is that a subscriber considers themselves as paying for all the news; accepts any "freeriding" on important news as a cost of generating the public good of an informed society; and leaves it to NARGs (should any exist) to account for the value proposition differently.

>Society is split like elsewhere, but the fringe parties like AFD are at 15% in general election weekly question [1]. This is Don Quixotery.

When you factor in most reporting about the American election (I'm American) only give percents in terms of voters (small portion of population), Trump also had ~15%.

This was a very serious incident, and the people who try these things should possibly be executed in a humane manner if this pattern of misbehavior continues.

Whoa, executing them might make them bigger heros in the eyes of their supporters aswell as make the government look like a bigger oppressor. Just ignore the shit out of them like a toddler throwing a tantrum while making sure that they don't hurt themselves or those near them.

Exactly last thing you want are monarchist martyrs.

That's how you ended up needing to arrest a bunch of morons who post all day about wanting to do exactly what they ended up attempting to do.

Instead what needs to happen is if execution is off the table, you very purposefully remind them, repeatedly, that there is nowhere to defect to -- you will not have quiet enjoyment of your Nazi coffeehouse, your Nazi bar, your Nazi... whatever... because the antifascists will not tolerate your behavior and invoke stand your ground the second you even hint at acting on your antisocial urges.

I'd suggest that a humane manner of execution does not exist because murder is fundamentally inhumane.

Primary source direct from Germany’s Minister of Justice: https://twitter.com/marcobuschmann/status/160046813821829939...

As an anglophone, I guess I should be proud that "der/das Whataboutism" is perfectly cromulent Denglish: https://www.duden.de/rechtschreibung/Whataboutism

What's the context for Crazy Glue, though? Is there now a political sibboleth even in the Bau und Hobby milieu?

Climate protesters gluing themselves to things. (Who are the true terrorism menace in todays Germany according to some)

Aha, I guess twitter threads follow a predictable pattern in every language.

> Heinrich XIII

The pensioned monarchs strike back. This reads like satire.

Imagine living all his life deprived, depressed and impotent of his divine right to rule and suddenly break free from that depression at 77 after browsing Qanon memes. Inner voice goes “yes you can” or “now it’s the right time” or “now or never”. Old man can plead senility but he has offspring, this can randomly erupt between now and next century.

No amount of money can force people to love you

You will be surprised. See politicians for example. They love _anything_ for money.

Perhaps but I suspect you're using a different definition of "love" than was intended.

They sound like sovereign citizens plus nazis plus Qanon. They have almost no room for any kind of reality left in their minds.

plus a dash of aging royalty. Seems like some old fart "prince" wanted to be head of state.

It worked in the french revolution.

Most of these people would have been guillotined during the French revolution.

Plus members of the AfD party, which is currently in the Bundestag, and under scrutinity for far-right / Nazi connection.

Sounds like Beer Hall putsch 2.0

Context: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beer_Hall_Putsch

Details of the plot little vague.

Maybe they are using the Plot of 1923. "First get arrested and then let the media do the dirty work".

The article sadly is rather thin on details of what they were trying to replace the state with.

I’m guessing the group is more familiar to Germans (I’m in the US) but I find wiki helpful. It’s not a monolithic movement but they basically want to go back to the German Reich circa 1918, and they have some kind of provisional government that’s supposed to be a continuation of this

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reichsbürger_movement

This group is about the German Empire in 1971, apparently.

Do you mean 1871? Wiki says 1871-1918 German Empire and that the first sort of shadow government from this group was founded in 1985

should be familiar to USians as well (imagine SovCits mit Lederhosen): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33893138

PS: my current favourite Los Angeles/Münich mashup is https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wbsEZzgCwmI

Edit: as far as I know (not being in either country) Reichsbürger and SovCits are a fringe in both, but far more of an obvious fringe in Deutschland than in the US.

> The movement argues that the German constitution prior to World War II was never properly nullified …

Prior to WWII - I assume they’re not talking about the Nazi regime, especially since they’re monarchists. Which constitution are they looking to restore? The Weimar constitution? The Pre-WWI constitution?

Probably a dumb question. Folks like this aren’t known for clarity of thought. Might be the Holy Roman Empire.

> The Weimar constitution

usually that one, the leading "theory" is that it's the last legitimate (and thus still valid) one

The German constitution was drafted in 1949 to try to learn the lessons from the war.

And that's relevant to the question of the Reichsbürger beliefs how? I'm confused why you felt the need to comment this.

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