A prince, a plot and a long-lost reich
Conspiracy theory inspired coup bid, German police say
BAD LOBENSTEIN, Germany — The crenelated hunting lodge of Prince Heinrich XIII of Reuss sits atop a steep hill, looking out over homes laced with snow and Christmas lights in Bad Lobenstein. Popular with the local mayor and many nearby villagers, the prince spent his weekends in the spa town, giving an aristocratic flair to this sleepy corner of rural eastern Germany.
But there was a darker side to his idyll.
Heinrich XIII, prosecutors and intelligence officials say, also used his lodge to host meetings where he and a band of far-right co-conspirators plotted to overthrow the German government and execute the chancellor. In the basement, the group stored weapons and explosives. In the forest that sloped beneath the lodge, they sometimes held target practice.
This past week the Waidmannsheil lodge, a threehour drive south of Berlin in the state of Thuringia, was one of 150 targets raided by security forces in one of postwar Germany’s biggest counterterrorist operations.
By Friday, 23 members of the cell had been detained across 11 German states and another 31 placed under investigation. Police discovered troves of arms and military equipment as well as a list of 18 politicians and journalists deemed to be enemies.
Heinrich XIII, 71, a well-off descendant of a 700-year-old noble family, may seem an unlikely ringleader of such a terrorist plot. But, prosecutors say, he was designated by his co-conspirators to become head of state in a postcoup
regime.
Nostalgic for the pre-1918 German empire, when his ancestors reigned over a state in eastern Germany, he had openly embraced a conspiracy theory that has gained momentum in far-right circles: that Germany’s postwar republic is not a sovereign country but a corporation set up by the Allies after World War II.
Followers of this conspiracy theory call themselves Reichsbuerger, or Citizens of the Reich. And there are a lot of them in southeastern Thuringia, the state where the Nazis first won power locally more than 90 years ago, before going on to establish the Third Reich.
Today, the state’s biggest political force is the far-right Alternative for Germany party, or AfD — one of whose former lawmakers was arrested as part of the prince’s alleged plot last week.
But it is the Reichsbuerger who have brought Bad
Lobenstein the most notoriety, to the chagrin of local hoteliers and vintners seeking to attract tourists to the area, where stone buildings and medieval church spires dot rolling landscapes of pine forests and lakes.
“They keep us pretty busy,” said Andree Burkhardt, a local council member. “But I could never have imagined we had a scene here that was that militant.”
Whenever Burkhardt and his fellow council members set up a booth at the local market to hear locals’ concerns, they end up facing a stream of verbal abuse from people insisting he is working for a country that does not exist.
“They yell at us and say: ‘We are not Germans. We are not in a real German state! We are just a branch of a GmbH!’ ” he said, referring to the German acronym for a limited liability company.
But the Reichsbuerger seemed like only a local
nuisance until Heinrich XIII appeared on the scene.
The prince pursued his goal of restoring Germany’s imperial Reich on multiple fronts, and in a way that almost seemed like he believed his fantasy realm already existed.
The editor of Bad Lobenstein’s local newspaper, Peter Hagen, first learned that the village had a prince in April 2021, when residents started telling him about strange campaign posters plastered on the streets beneath the Waidmannsheil lodge, urging residents to run for elections with the “Reuss election commission.”
There were no official elections at the time.
Hagen grew more suspicious this past summer after he followed Heinrich XIII and another local Reichsbuerger figure to a municipal office, which the mayor at the time had allowed them to use for a lecture called “An information event on the
BRD GmbH” — an acronym for the Federal Republic of Germany Inc.
The title clearly implied a connection to Reichsbuerger beliefs. But when Hagen arrived, the organizers refused to begin their meeting, and he was not able to listen to the lecture.
A sense of unease in Bad Lobenstein began to grow in July, when a letter arrived in people’s mailboxes.
It was punctuated with exclamation points and capital letters, urging them to use a website to register for citizenship under the House of Reuss. (Noble titles were abolished after World War I, but many erstwhile royal families avidly track their lineage.)
“Do you also have the feeling that something in this country isn’t right?” the letter read. “Did you know that you actually are not in possession of any citizenship, that you are actually stateless and possess no rights?”
Bad Lobenstein is home to 6,000 people, and some say it feels more like a village than a town. Everyone knows each other, and the only cafe there sells out of pastries and coffee by noon. Within hours of receiving the letter, Burkhardt, the local council member, realized he was not the only one who received it — everyone had.
He spoke to Hagen, and after trading what they had seen or heard, Burkhardt began to feel uneasy. “I thought: Maybe we should have this looked into. So we actually reported it to the domestic intelligence agency. They told us: ‘We’re on the case.’ And I think honestly, they took it more seriously than I did.”
Intelligence officials had been watching the prince since the fall of 2021, and what they were discovering was far more sinister:
The group of co-conspirators around Heinrich XIII included current and former soldiers from the elite special forces, police officers, army reservists and others with links to the military who had worked out concrete plans and even prospective dates for a coup, officials said.
Already twice this year the group appeared ready to act — once in mid-March and once in September, putting security agencies on high alert, but each time they postponed, intelligence officials said.
The prince recruited support not only in far-right circles close to the military. He also sought allies among fellow aristocrats, traveling to Austria and Switzerland to court German-speaking nobility for donations to finance his plot, officials familiar with his travels said.
With the money he collected, his group bought satellite phones to communicate off the grid during and after the planned coup. The phones were later found at the prince’s lodge during the raid.