Prosecutors in Hamburg have said affiliates of the radical “Reichsbürger” movement planned to elicit Russian help in an attempt to overthrow the German state.

Prosecutors in the northern German city of Hamburg filed charges against a 66-year-old man accused of supporting a terrorist organization and aiding and abetting the preparation of a treasonable enterprise in connection with an alleged plot to overthrow the German government.

Prosecutors said the man who was arrested last November, has been a supporter of the “United Patriots” offshoot of the extremist “Reichsbürger” movement since at least 2022.

The Reichsbürger (“citizens of the Reich”) movement doesn’t recognize the post-Second World War Federal Republic of Germany, its laws or its institutions.

The United Patriots offshoot seeks “to replace the liberal-democratic basic order of the Federal Republic of Germany with an authoritarian system of government modeled on the constitution of the German Reich of 1871,” prosecutors added.

  • Maple Engineer@lemmy.world
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    3 months ago

    Among other things, members and supporters of the group allegedly planned to sail a ship into Russian territorial waters and make contact with Russian President Vladimir Putin.

    They had hoped for military and political support from Putin in the founding of a new state, according to the Hamburg public prosecutor’s office.

    When you develop your collective fantasies in an echo bunker with no one to say, “Do you think that actually happen? What if he says, ‘No’? What if you get caught?” they grow and become more and more ludicrous.