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He is accused of being part of a frustrated coup. He is the latest in a long family saga that goes back more than 700 years in the Reuss region.
Dozens of people belonging to a reactionary and neo-Nazi movement were arrested last week in Germany accused of preparing a coup which included the armed assault on the Bundestag and the kidnapping and murder of prominent political figures, including Olaf Scholz, head of government. The list of people to be executed included 18 high-ranking politicians.
They were members of a nebula of neo-Nazi cliques known as ‘Reichsbürger’ (Ciudadanos del Reich). Among them, now imprisoned, there is a judge and former deputy, military commanders and retired police officers, businessmen and above all a figure stands out, that of Prince Henry XIII of Reuss.
Henry XIII is the latest in a long family saga that se dates back more than 700 years and that until the end of the First World War he had control of a region of eastern Germany. In the past he had already shown signs of anti-Semitism and of not respecting democratic institutions, but he was never seen as more than a charlatan, he was never seen as someone truly dangerous.
Not the potential heir to the Reuss principality but the 17th in the line of succession. His distant cousin Enrique XIV (in the family they have the custom of putting Enrique and an ordinal to all males) said after the arrests that his cousin is just “a confused old man” and with whom the family has not had relations for more of a decade.
far right
the researchers they now believe that he would be the leader of the frustrated coup attempt and that he was the person who should be named head of an authoritarian regime that should succeed the current democracy. In the cellars of his manor house in Bad Lobenstein, investigators found weapons and explosives.
The town is in Thuringia, the German lander that was one of the cradles of Nazism and where the far-right party AfD has one of its strongholds as the first political force (it does not govern the region because the others agree to avoid it).
Henry XIII is the epitome of the Prussian authoritarian tradition, mixed with Nazi ideology and seasoned with various conspiracy theories. Among other things, he believes that the democratic Germany that emerged after the Second World War and the Allied occupation is actually a company at the service of the victorious powers of the Second World War.
radicalization
His political passion centered for years on restore the German Empire before the First World War, one of the main roots of Europe being the epicenter of the two world wars in less than 30 years. A regime geographically and politically erased from the face of the earth at the end of the second world conflagration.
Up to now his life was that of any moderately well-to-do bourgeois, someone who lived on rents and who had worked as a real estate agent and wine merchant in the past.
For decades, since German reunification in 1990 after the fall of the Berlin Wall, tried to recover property that had belonged to his family and that they had been requisitioned by the communist regime that ruled East Germany after World War II. He never got it.
The first signs of radicalization appear in 2019. In a video that could be viewed on YouTube until days ago but has since been deleted, he was seen giving a conference in Switzerland in which he said that Germany was pushed into the First World War by the interests of the international finance (typical anti-Semitic discourse) and that the German state as such is an illusion, that in reality the country is a company at the service of foreign powers.
In that speech he said: “After having ruled for millennia, my dynasty was deprived of all its power after the First World War.” He also pointed out (another anti-Semitic custom) “to the Rothschild family” and to “Masonic finances”.
Henry XIII is a wake-up call to the German security services. In recent years, leaders at the level of his interior minister have singled out the violent far right as the biggest security threat to the country.
This frustrated coup attempt, which probably would not have gone anywhere due to the entity and the number of those involved, shows that in Germany there is still an anti-democratic extreme rightseditious and willing to go to violence.
PB