In post-war Germany’s debut high treason trial commencing on Monday, an army officer, astrologer and aristocrat are amongst the intriguing figures promising a tense and high-security judicial spectacle. Approximately a year and a half earlier, their purported plan to destabilize the democratic order of Germany was thwarted by a wave of high-visibility operations, which culminated in an outpour of satirical memes and late-night talk show humour in the latter part of 2022.
The extraordinary legal proceedings, which feature 27 individuals implicated across three simultaneous court cases in Munich, Frankfurt and Stuttgart, are unsurprisingly raising a significant number of uncomfortable questions. Notably, how did the alleged conspirators advance their plot to such an extent?
The scheme was extraordinary: after receiving a signal through satellite phones, a heavily armed militia with almost 150,000 rounds of ammunition was scheduled to seize the Reichstag parliament structure in Berlin, apprehend MPs, and declare a coup.
Anticipating the coup, Heinrich XIII Prinz Reuss zu Köstritz, a 71-year-old real estate tycoon and vintner of noble descent, stood by to head a new government. His alleged key collaborator was Birgit Malsack-Winkemann, a Berlin circuit court judge and previous MP aligned with the far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD).
The prosecution alleges the individuals, among others, were members of a secretive “council” that strategised the coup for at least a year, in chats and phone calls intercepted by domestic intelligence. Subsequently, former military and police personnel reportedly joined the cause, forming an additional paramilitary faction.
Reuss, Malsack-Winkemann and eight others of this “political council” will go to trial on the 21st of May in Frankfurt. Concurrently, an additional eight supposed accomplices are set to face courts in Munich in June.
On Monday, the Stuttgart trial will convene, where the alleged paramilitary conspirators will be trialled on charges of belonging to a terrorist group and treason, marking the first instance of such charges in contemporary Germany.
This significant trial will occur in Stuttgart higher regional court’s new high-security compound within the Stammhem prison, once the site of trials for the Red Army Faction terrorists in the 1970s.
In an effort to expedite the legal activities without compromising the defendants’ due process, the federal prosecutor’s office in Germany has ordered the case to be divided across three simultaneous procedures.
Dr Andreas Singer, the Stuttgart upper regional court president, emphasised the importance of lawful proceedings, rejecting the notion of a mock trial. The trial began on Monday with a defendant known as Markus L, arrested in March 2023, three months post the initial raid. Markus faces a myriad of charges, including terrorism, conspiracy, and attempted murder following a police shoot-out that resulted in two officers injured.
The Stuttgart proceedings are expected to shed light on the connections between the accused and Germany’s Reichsbürger movement – a collective of an approximate 23,000 individuals who refute the existence of the German state. A significant number of these individuals amass arms in anticipation of potential armed protests.
According to Stuttgart authorities, the plot’s nexus was its paramilitary arm, directed by leaders subscribing to an array of conspiracy theories. Among the accused in Stuttgart is former elite army officer Rüdiger von Pescatore, also a link to the political council, known for echoing unfounded statements from the American QAnon movement about clandestine child-abuse networks prevalent in regional political and entertainment sectors.
The Stuttgart trials will assist in determining the progression of the purported coup’s technical aspects, given the prosecutors’ description of Reuss and his team’s erratic political planning. The Stuttgart trial, involving seven judges, 22 solicitors, 300 witness testimonies and 425,000 pages of case files, is set to be the most significant legal event in Germany for many years.
Given the severe nature of the crimes and Reichsbürger group’s radical approach, stringent security measures are underway. The tailor-made court facility, a 55-meter-long pre-made cabin, boasts a network of security cameras, secure gates, and a bulletproof glass panel separating the court from the public viewing area.
As the trial continues, Stuttgart prosecutors will disclose more information about the alleged coup, which includes lists of high-profile individuals marked for detention. From their documents, it appears that the coup plotters were aware that their schemes could potentially result in fatalities. In the same vein, any plotter who leaked the coup’s plans to outsiders would be met with severe consequences, with treason potentially punishable by death.