Latest news with #PeterFitzek
Spectator
21-05-2025
- Politics
- Spectator
Monarchism is a real threat to the German state
Last week a man called Peter Fitzek was apprehended by police. He calls himself King Peter I, and he is the head of the 'Kingdom of Germany', the largest of a number of groups that don't accept the legitimacy of the current German state and want to replace it with their own. Monarchism may not be widespread in Germany, but the idea certainly has a dedicated following. Police came down hard on Fitzek's realm in coordinated morning raids last Tuesday. Over 800 police officers stormed and searched properties in seven German states, leading to the arrest of 'King Peter' and three other people deemed to be the ringleaders of the group, which is estimated to be 1,000 members strong (though Fitzek claims it's 6,000 nationally).
Yahoo
19-05-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Germany Arrests King Peter I, the Son of Man, the Messiah
Last week, Germany arrested Peter Fitzek, 59, an anti-government figure also known as King Peter I, the Son of Man, the Messiah. Historically, attempts to arrest messiahs have met with mixed results, so to stay on the safe side, the Interior Ministry not only rolled up Fitzek and three conspirators but also shut down his whole operation, known as the Kingdom of Germany. Subjects of King Peter deny the legitimacy of the Federal Republic of Germany and, over the past 13 years, have built up a counter-state with its own institutions. 'In Germany, just like in the rest of the world, we have a lot of problems,' Peter told me in 2023. 'These problems could not be solved in the old system, so we needed a completely new one.' A healer, a martial artist, and practitioner of dark arts, Peter has no royal lineage and instead takes his authority from the spiritual plane. The German government alleges that he ran unregulated financial systems, and they banned his group outright. Peter was born in East Germany in 1965. East Germany was poorer than the West then and remains so decades after unification, in 1989. Its failure to catch up economically has led to resentment by many easterners, who consider themselves neglected and forgotten. The far-right Alternative for Germany party, which now controls a quarter of the seats in the German Parliament, campaigned in the East on promises to increase the region's political power. The AfD lost and was officially accused of extremism. The center-left coalition that won is now cracking down on the broader movement of eccentric political discontents. Peter, it seems, was a familiar type of East German from that generation—too old to learn the ways of the new Germany, and too ambitious to be satisfied watching others succeed where he failed. According to a profile in Bloomberg Businessweek, Peter spent his early adulthood getting outwitted in business by West Germans, originally as the bilked investor in a slot-machine racket. [Read: Is the AfD too extreme for democracy?] When I met Peter two years ago, he had recently acquired a castle and invited me to join him there, in an annoyingly remote Saxon village called Eibenstock, near the Czech border. The journey took four hours from Berlin, and upon leaving the Autobahn and skidding around mountain roads, I began to appreciate the significance of the remoteness. Eibenstock is far from Germany's equivalent of coastal elites. It is like Montana or Idaho: You can do what you please, safe in the knowledge that few witnesses will see you doing it. It was quiet and empty with many private areas secluded by spruce and firs. I noticed a few tourists on a winter hike, and at the foot of the castle I had coffee at a tiny restaurant with the unimprovable name Goulash Cannon. Peter came into his castle's echoing, wood-paneled entryway, sporting a ponytail, pulled back tight and short, and wearing a monogrammed shirt with the words Kingdom of Germany in gold cursive on the breast. In this respect and others, he resembled Steven Seagal, another aging martial artist with delusions of divinity and grandeur. Peter then guided me to a sparsely furnished sitting room for my royal audience. He began, unbidden, by laying out proof that his kingship had been recognized internationally. This proof took the form of boarding passes that various airlines had honored, listing his name as 'Peter of Germany.' He had a 'Kingdom of Germany' passport that looked official enough, and had passed inspection, he said, at various borders. All of the airline documents I saw were from within the Schengen area, which means he could travel freely anyway. An airline agent had probably rolled his eyes and let him board his flight to Majorca. When I think of entities capable of conferring royal status, I do not think of Ryanair. His education, he said, began under the tutelage of a contract killer he met in 1989. The man understood spirituality, Peter said, and knew how to hypnotize people and take their money. Peter read up on magic, philosophy, religion, history, and finally law, before he concluded that there was an 'order to creation,' something beautiful and true, an existence freed of the corruption and disappointment of the Federal Republic of Germany. 'I slowly became aware that there is a Creator,' he told me, and that this Creator had endowed him with spiritual powers that proved his divine right to rule. 'I have sat as near to God as you sit to me right now,' he said. He determined that 'true Christianity has never existed,' and that he had been sent to establish it. He fell in love with a woman who could move objects with her mind and set them on fire; he spent time with holy men in India; he discovered cold fusion; Satanists detected his growing powers and sent assassins after him. 'I am lord of the spirits. I have an invisible army. I cannot be harmed.' At first, he said, he tried to improve German democracy by working within the system. 'Before I founded the Kingdom of Germany, I ran as a candidate for the Bundestag. I had previously talked to a lot of members of the Bundestag as well as members of the state parliament for many, many hours,' Peter told me. He said he saw how decisions were made—and how fruitless was any hope of changing a system that had grown beyond the ability of even the most patient citizen to affect. 'The system interlocks in others,' he said. 'It is a nested system, where you can't change individual segments because then they don't fit with the rest.' Foremost among his frustrations were the modern bureaucracies that seemed designed not to serve citizens and help them prosper but to frustrate and enslave them. 'The health system, the pension system, the monetary system, and the banks all have problems,' he told me. 'They cannot be solved in the system. So a new one has to be started.' He said he examined the law and found that the position of Kaiser, supposedly abolished, remained vacant. All it needed was a suitable claimant—and having been anointed by the Creator, he claimed legal succession in 2009. 'We had to claim this legal succession if we wanted to establish a new system throughout Germany and not do what the Allies, the Americans, imposed on us,' Peter said. Photos of his official coronation in 2012 show him in faux-ermine robes. 'We in the Kingdom of Germany take the view that there is a divine order of creation,' Peter said. 'The state should be a reflection of this order of creation, and should be a completely just society or community, like nothing hitherto seen on this planet.' He conducted seminars for his followers, to show off his and his fire-starter girlfriend's ability to leave their bodies, perform feats of physiological impossibility like slowing their heartbeats, and commune with the archangels Uriel and Metatron. To see this is to believe, he said. 'The Creator sent me here to be able to establish the Kingdom, and people can choose freely whether to join.' In 2016, the state imprisoned him for taking supporters' money in what appeared to be a totally unregulated banking scheme. An appeals court freed him after two years, and he insisted to me that his willingness to go to prison proved his divinity. 'Only someone who has been called by God does that.' Under Peter's watch, the Kingdom practiced a kind of primitive democracy, with—crucially—a banking and insurance system totally disconnected from that of the rest of the world. But the details of how Peter ran his kingdom are irrelevant, if colorful. He said the Kingdom will choose his successor by election. 'My son, for example, will not succeed me,' he told me, unless the young man exhibits supernatural powers like his father's and convinces other citizens of his eligibility. Peter had identified sources of frustration and indignity that might bother virtually any German: how one navigates banking, taxation, health care, law. People of much greater education and sophistication than Peter have found themselves at the mercy of these systems, and treated most heartlessly by them. Germans have a slang term, Überzwerg, which means 'head dwarf,' and refers to the petty tyrants in modern bureaucracies who ruin your day by demanding forms in triplicate and inflict other minor hassles that keep you from getting something as simple as a credit card issued or a cavity filled. Navigating modern, complex bureaucratic states is difficult but comes easier if you had an elite education in a big city—the Überzwergs' natural environment. To people without this background, and who fail in business or politics in consequence, others' success may look like the result of magic, fraud, or conspiracy. Peter resorted to at least the first of these and probably all three. In his castle, he described spiritual warfare with ghosts and devils. Who is an Überzwerg but a devil sent to torment you—and in the cruelest way, by taking human form and swearing up and down that he is no devil at all, only the most mundane creature, with a nameplate on his desk and a time clock on his wall? And if you discover that you are living in a premodern, enchanted world, why not go all the way and declare yourself king by divine right? The direction our conversation took next was as predictable as it was repulsive. Peter's ultimate prescription to treat the diseased system of money and power was to get rid of the cabal of Satanic Jews that has taken over the world outside his Kingdom. He said he did not mind Jews per se but objected to the usurers and tricksters who start and encourage all the world's great wars, including Russia's invasion of Ukraine; who deny his status as their redeemer; and who are conspiring to steer us all to the apocalypse. Peter had my attention when he talked about pyrokinesis, and he had my sympathies when grousing about bureaucracy. But Jews run the world through a network of banks and Chabad houses is the most tired claim an extremist (especially a German one) can make. It was then that I lost interest and started thinking about whether the Goulash Cannon would still be loaded and ready to fire a late lunch into my face. On the way out the door, Peter stamped my passport with a Kingdom of Germany royal seal and signed it with a scribble: Peter I, Son of Man, Imperator. Article originally published at The Atlantic
Atlantic
19-05-2025
- Politics
- Atlantic
Germany Arrests King Peter I, the Son of Man, the Messiah
Last week, Germany arrested Peter Fitzek, 59, an anti-government figure also known as King Peter I, the Son of Man, the Messiah. Historically, attempts to arrest messiahs have met with mixed results, so to stay on the safe side, the Interior Ministry not only rolled up Fitzek and three conspirators but also shut down his whole operation, known as the Kingdom of Germany. Subjects of King Peter deny the legitimacy of the Federal Republic of Germany and, over the past 13 years, have built up a counter-state with its own institutions. 'In Germany, just like in the rest of the world, we have a lot of problems,' Peter told me in 2023. 'These problems could not be solved in the old system, so we needed a completely new one.' A healer, a martial artist, and practitioner of dark arts, Peter has no royal lineage and instead takes his authority from the spiritual plane. The German government alleges that he ran unregulated financial systems, and they banned his group outright. Peter was born in East Germany in 1965. East Germany was poorer than the West then and remains so decades after unification, in 1989. Its failure to catch up economically has led to resentment by many easterners, who consider themselves neglected and forgotten. The far-right Alternative for Germany party, which now controls a quarter of the seats in the German Parliament, campaigned in the East on promises to increase the region's political power. The AfD lost and was officially accused of extremism. The center-left coalition that won is now cracking down on the broader movement of eccentric political discontents. Peter, it seems, was a familiar type of East German from that generation—too old to learn the ways of the new Germany, and too ambitious to be satisfied watching others succeed where he failed. According to a profile in Bloomberg Businessweek, Peter spent his early adulthood getting outwitted in business by West Germans, originally as the bilked investor in a slot-machine racket. When I met Peter two years ago, he had recently acquired a castle and invited me to join him there, in an annoyingly remote Saxon village called Eibenstock, near the Czech border. The journey took four hours from Berlin, and upon leaving the Autobahn and skidding around mountain roads, I began to appreciate the significance of the remoteness. Eibenstock is far from Germany's equivalent of coastal elites. It is like Montana or Idaho: You can do what you please, safe in the knowledge that few witnesses will see you doing it. It was quiet and empty with many private areas secluded by spruce and firs. I noticed a few tourists on a winter hike, and at the foot of the castle I had coffee at a tiny restaurant with the unimprovable name Goulash Cannon. Peter came into his castle's echoing, wood-paneled entryway, sporting a ponytail, pulled back tight and short, and wearing a monogrammed shirt with the words Kingdom of Germany in gold cursive on the breast. In this respect and others, he resembled Steven Seagal, another aging martial artist with delusions of divinity and grandeur. Peter then guided me to a sparsely furnished sitting room for my royal audience. He began, unbidden, by laying out proof that his kingship had been recognized internationally. This proof took the form of boarding passes that various airlines had honored, listing his name as 'Peter of Germany.' He had a 'Kingdom of Germany' passport that looked official enough, and had passed inspection, he said, at various borders. All of the airline documents I saw were from within the Schengen area, which means he could travel freely anyway. An airline agent had probably rolled his eyes and let him board his flight to Majorca. When I think of entities capable of conferring royal status, I do not think of Ryanair. His education, he said, began under the tutelage of a contract killer he met in 1989. The man understood spirituality, Peter said, and knew how to hypnotize people and take their money. Peter read up on magic, philosophy, religion, history, and finally law, before he concluded that there was an 'order to creation,' something beautiful and true, an existence freed of the corruption and disappointment of the Federal Republic of Germany. 'I slowly became aware that there is a Creator,' he told me, and that this Creator had endowed him with spiritual powers that proved his divine right to rule. 'I have sat as near to God as you sit to me right now,' he said. He determined that 'true Christianity has never existed,' and that he had been sent to establish it. He fell in love with a woman who could move objects with her mind and set them on fire; he spent time with holy men in India; he discovered cold fusion; Satanists detected his growing powers and sent assassins after him. 'I am lord of the spirits. I have an invisible army. I cannot be harmed.' At first, he said, he tried to improve German democracy by working within the system. 'Before I founded the Kingdom of Germany, I ran as a candidate for the Bundestag. I had previously talked to a lot of members of the Bundestag as well as members of the state parliament for many, many hours,' Peter told me. He said he saw how decisions were made—and how fruitless was any hope of changing a system that had grown beyond the ability of even the most patient citizen to affect. 'The system interlocks in others,' he said. 'It is a nested system, where you can't change individual segments because then they don't fit with the rest.' Foremost among his frustrations were the modern bureaucracies that seemed designed not to serve citizens and help them prosper but to frustrate and enslave them. 'The health system, the pension system, the monetary system, and the banks all have problems,' he told me. 'They cannot be solved in the system. So a new one has to be started.' He said he examined the law and found that the position of Kaiser, supposedly abolished, remained vacant. All it needed was a suitable claimant—and having been anointed by the Creator, he claimed legal succession in 2009. 'We had to claim this legal succession if we wanted to establish a new system throughout Germany and not do what the Allies, the Americans, imposed on us,' Peter said. Photos of his official coronation in 2012 show him in faux-ermine robes. 'We in the Kingdom of Germany take the view that there is a divine order of creation,' Peter said. 'The state should be a reflection of this order of creation, and should be a completely just society or community, like nothing hitherto seen on this planet.' He conducted seminars for his followers, to show off his and his fire-starter girlfriend's ability to leave their bodies, perform feats of physiological impossibility like slowing their heartbeats, and commune with the archangels Uriel and Metatron. To see this is to believe, he said. 'The Creator sent me here to be able to establish the Kingdom, and people can choose freely whether to join.' In 2016, the state imprisoned him for taking supporters' money in what appeared to be a totally unregulated banking scheme. An appeals court freed him after two years, and he insisted to me that his willingness to go to prison proved his divinity. 'Only someone who has been called by God does that.' Under Peter's watch, the Kingdom practiced a kind of primitive democracy, with—crucially—a banking and insurance system totally disconnected from that of the rest of the world. But the details of how Peter ran his kingdom are irrelevant, if colorful. He said the Kingdom will choose his successor by election. 'My son, for example, will not succeed me,' he told me, unless the young man exhibits supernatural powers like his father's and convinces other citizens of his eligibility. Peter had identified sources of frustration and indignity that might bother virtually any German: how one navigates banking, taxation, health care, law. People of much greater education and sophistication than Peter have found themselves at the mercy of these systems, and treated most heartlessly by them. Germans have a slang term, Überzwerg, which means 'head dwarf,' and refers to the petty tyrants in modern bureaucracies who ruin your day by demanding forms in triplicate and inflict other minor hassles that keep you from getting something as simple as a credit card issued or a cavity filled. Navigating modern, complex bureaucratic states is difficult but comes easier if you had an elite education in a big city—the Überzwerg s' natural environment. To people without this background, and who fail in business or politics in consequence, others' success may look like the result of magic, fraud, or conspiracy. Peter resorted to at least the first of these and probably all three. In his castle, he described spiritual warfare with ghosts and devils. Who is an Überzwerg but a devil sent to torment you—and in the cruelest way, by taking human form and swearing up and down that he is no devil at all, only the most mundane creature, with a nameplate on his desk and a time clock on his wall? And if you discover that you are living in a premodern, enchanted world, why not go all the way and declare yourself king by divine right? The direction our conversation took next was as predictable as it was repulsive. Peter's ultimate prescription to treat the diseased system of money and power was to get rid of the cabal of Satanic Jews that has taken over the world outside his Kingdom. He said he did not mind Jews per se but objected to the usurers and tricksters who start and encourage all the world's great wars, including Russia's invasion of Ukraine; who deny his status as their redeemer; and who are conspiring to steer us all to the apocalypse. Peter had my attention when he talked about pyrokinesis, and he had my sympathies when grousing about bureaucracy. But Jews run the world through a network of banks and Chabad houses is the most tired claim an extremist (especially a German one) can make. It was then that I lost interest and started thinking about whether the Goulash Cannon would still be loaded and ready to fire a late lunch into my face. On the way out the door, Peter stamped my passport with a Kingdom of Germany royal seal and signed it with a scribble: Peter I, Son of Man, Imperator.
Yahoo
14-05-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
A former chef declared himself King of Germany. This week Germany arrested him
As dawn broke over Germany's eastern state of Saxony on Tuesday morning, heavily armed police massed outside a property in the picturesque village of Halsbrücke and prepared to smash down its front door. It was 6am, and inside the house was a declared enemy of the state. But this was no ordinary criminal, but a monarch, a self-described one at least. Peter Fitzek, a 59-year-old former chef and karate instructor, has spent more than a decade denying the legitimacy of the Federal Republic of Germany and advocating for a return to the borders established during the Second Reich of 1871-1918. Following his arrest, it now seems likely that 'Peter I's' political aspirations as 'King of Germany' will meet a similarly ignominious end to those of his hero, the Kaiser. 'This is illegal and unlawful,' he told reporters on Tuesday as he was ushered into a police car. According to the rules of his own self-proclaimed seat, the so-called Kingdom of Germany, he may have been right. The son of a digger driver, Fitzek was brought up in East Germany. Having failed to secure elected office, either as a mayor or member of the German Parliament, he felt he had no choice but to proclaim an independent kingdom from the grounds of a former hospital in the city of Wittenberg. Fitzek filmed his own coronation in 2012, adorned in ermine robes and holding a mediaeval sword. No stranger to publicity, he has continued to be the subject of bemused profiles in media outlets from New York to Tel Aviv to Sydney in the years since. Life under a king, he told one interviewer, was 'the natural state of the German people'. The country's borders should, he argued, expand to reclaim countries like Poland 'if the people there wanted it'. His own constitution 'came through God – I just dictated it'. And he, himself, was, of course, the reincarnation of the Archangel Uriel. For all the attention he generated, Fitzek and the disparate grouping of nostalgic, anti-state conspiracy theorists who made up his following were largely dismissed as harmless eccentrics prior to the Covid pandemic. But after purchasing a 300-acre estate in Saxony in 2022, he boasted that his kingdom was 'now two and a half times the size of the Vatican'. As his influence grew, there were plenty of signs that the divine right of Peter I to rule small pockets of eastern Germany risked coming into conflict with the secular rights of the federal German authorities. In 2017, Fitzek was convicted of embezzlement of £1.2 million, although a higher court overturned the verdict the following year. He has subsequently been convicted for driving without a licence (the court didn't recognise the one issued by his own kingdom), running his own health insurance programme and assault, a district court taking a dim view of his attempt to claim immunity as a head of state. By 2022, he had claimed 5,000 'citizens', many of them refusing to send their children to school, which is illegal in Germany, or pay tax, which is illegal almost everywhere. Instead, some of his subjects joined his 'system drop-out' seminars, priced at £295 and payable in 'Engelgeld' (angel money), his own currency. Despite Fitzek's protestations that his kingdom simply stands for a 'willingness to take responsibility', it was designated an extremist organisation in 2022 by the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (BfV), Germany's domestic intelligence agency. Three years of close observation culminated in this week's raids involving 800 security personnel in seven states. After being arrested along with several other senior 'subjects', Fitzek was accused by Alexander Dobrindt, German's interior minister, of 'undermining the rule of law' and spreading 'antisemitic conspiracy narratives to back up their supposed claim to authority'. His organisation, the Kingdom of Germany, has been banned. 'Today, a significant blow was struck against the so-called Reich Citizens and Self-Governors,' Dobrindt wrote on X. 'With the so-called 'Kingdom of Germany,' the largest association of this scene, which has been growing for years, was banned.' Dobrindt's tweet is a reminder of the strange, overlapping world of extremist German nostalgics. Abutting the Venn diagram of Fitzek's 'subjects' is the much larger circle of some 25,000 Reichsbürger ('Reich Citizens') who also deny the legitimacy of the country's 1949 constitution and want to re-establish a monarchy that was deposed in 1918. They have been under observation by the BfV since 2016, when one of its members shot dead a police officer during a raid at his home. The Covid lockdown in 2020 swelled their ranks – and their extremism. 'People spent a lot of time in isolation, in front of computers,' explains Jakob Guhl, an expert in far-Right extremism at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue. 'Chat forums, such as Telegram, which are [largely] unregulated, saw a huge inflow of anti-vaccine people and far-Right groups. Part of that mix was Reichsbürger, and there was suddenly a far larger audience.' According to German government figures, Reichsbürger committed 1,000 extremist criminal acts in 2021, a twofold increase from the previous year. Officials estimate that 10 per cent of its members are potentially violent and five per cent Right-wing extremists. 'The ideology of rejecting state authority and holding historical revisionist ideas, many of them anti-Semitic, always had the potential to unload itself very badly,' says Guhl. As Covid ebbed and flowed, this first manifested itself in protestors attempting to storm the parliament building in Berlin in August 2020, while waving the pre-1918 flag of the German Empire. The following April, the police foiled a plot by a group calling themselves United Patriots, a subset of the Reichsbürger movement, who wanted to kidnap the health minister, foster a civil war and overthrow the democratic system. Four men aged 46 to 58 and a 77-year-old former teacher were jailed in March this year. The most infamous manifestation of the Reichsbürgers' violent, revisionist intentions was an attempted coup in December 2022, foiled by 5,000 police officers operating in 11 of Germany's 16 states, the largest such operation since 1945. The plot contained many farcical elements, notably a belief that Elizabeth II was part of a global, child-abusing elite and a cast of conspirators that included minor aristocrats, a chef and an opera singer. However, its deadly intentions were apparent from the discovery of 380 guns, 350 bladed weapons and more than 148,000 rounds of ammunition. Its alleged members, whose trials started last year and are still ongoing, included a former AfD member of the Bundestag and a founding member of the German special forces. Interviewed by the BBC shortly after the attempted coup, Fitzek said he had no intention of doing something similar himself (although he did describe the German state as 'destructive and sick', adding he had 'no interest in being part of this fascist and satanic system'). It is, however, interesting to note that some of the conspirators espoused the same historical views as the 'Kingdom of Germany', notably the self-proclaimed Heinrich XIII, a 73-year-old prince from the House of Reuss, who was alleged to have been central to their plans. Prince Reuss, whose family ruled parts of Thuringia until 1918, has recorded videos complaining that his '1,000-year dynasty' had been unjustly usurped. His co-conspirators allegedly shared a vision of returning Germany to elements of its Bismarckian constitutional settlement – a sentiment which enjoys a low but substantial level of support across Germany. Recent polls have shown that almost 10 per cent of the population would like to see the return of the monarchy, a figure that doubles for those under the age of 34. 'The Second Reich is a bit less problematic than harking back to the Nazis,' explains Guhl. 'It doesn't have the same level of toxicity attached to it. The symbols don't tend to be banned; the flags won't necessarily get you into trouble. It's a past that's easier to idealise for movements that want an idealised version of the past.' But this idealised version of the Second Reich ignores the reality of a new country riven by political and cultural divisions and destroyed in the First World War by the Kaiser's ham-fisted Weltpolitik. And as Dobrindt, the interior minister said of Fitzek's arrest this week: 'We are not talking about a group of harmless nostalgics, as the title of the organisation might suggest, but about criminal structures and a criminal network.' There is also an argument that these German nostalgics, however ill-intentioned, would benefit from a better grasp of the historical period they claim to fetishise. The Kaiser died unhappily in exile in 1941, rejected by his own people. Even at the start of the second Reich, a mere Prussian aristocrat knew how to put minor royalty in its place. When Bismarck, the German chancellor, was unifying Germany in 1870, he placated the reluctant King Ludwig of II of Bavaria by offering him his own separate postal service – and little else. Broaden your horizons with award-winning British journalism. Try The Telegraph free for 1 month with unlimited access to our award-winning website, exclusive app, money-saving offers and more.
Telegraph
14-05-2025
- Politics
- Telegraph
A former chef declared himself King of Germany. This week Germany arrested him
As dawn broke over Germany's eastern state of Saxony on Tuesday morning, heavily armed police massed outside a property in the picturesque village of Halsbrücke and prepared to smash down its front door. It was 6am, and inside the house was a declared enemy of the state. But this was no ordinary criminal, but a monarch, a self-described one at least. Peter Fitzek, a 59-year-old former chef and karate instructor, has spent more than a decade denying the legitimacy of the Federal Republic of Germany and advocating for a return to the borders established during the Second Reich of 1871-1918. Following his arrest, it now seems likely that 'Peter I's' political aspirations as 'King of Germany' will meet a similarly ignominious end to those of his hero, the Kaiser. 'This is illegal and unlawful,' he told reporters on Tuesday as he was ushered into a police car. According to the rules of his own self-proclaimed seat, the so-called Kingdom of Germany, he may have been right. A kingdom 'two and a half times the size of the Vatican' The son of a digger driver, Fitzek was brought up in East Germany. Having failed to secure elected office, either as a mayor or member of the German Parliament, he felt he had no choice but to proclaim an independent kingdom from the grounds of a former hospital in the city of Wittenberg. Fitzek filmed his own coronation in 2012, adorned in ermine robes and holding a mediaeval sword. No stranger to publicity, he has continued to be the subject of bemused profiles in media outlets from New York to Tel Aviv to Sydney in the years since. Life under a king, he told one interviewer, was 'the natural state of the German people'. The country's borders should, he argued, expand to reclaim countries like Poland 'if the people there wanted it'. His own constitution 'came through God – I just dictated it'. And he, himself, was, of course, the reincarnation of the Archangel Uriel. For all the attention he generated, Fitzek and the disparate grouping of nostalgic, anti-state conspiracy theorists who made up his following were largely dismissed as harmless eccentrics prior to the Covid pandemic. But after purchasing a 300-acre estate in Saxony in 2022, he boasted that his kingdom was 'now two and a half times the size of the Vatican'. Embezzlement, tax avoidance and anti-Semitism As his influence grew, there were plenty of signs that the divine right of Peter I to rule small pockets of eastern Germany risked coming into conflict with the secular rights of the federal German authorities. In 2017, Fitzek was convicted of embezzlement of £1.2 million, although a higher court overturned the verdict the following year. He has subsequently been convicted for driving without a licence (the court didn't recognise the one issued by his own kingdom), running his own health insurance programme and assault, a district court taking a dim view of his attempt to claim immunity as a head of state. By 2022, he had claimed 5,000 'citizens', many of them refusing to send their children to school, which is illegal in Germany, or pay tax, which is illegal almost everywhere. Instead, some of his subjects joined his 'system drop-out' seminars, priced at £295 and payable in 'Engelgeld' (angel money), his own currency. Despite Fitzek's protestations that his kingdom simply stands for a 'willingness to take responsibility', it was designated an extremist organisation in 2022 by the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (BfV), Germany's domestic intelligence agency. Three years of close observation culminated in this week's raids involving 800 security personnel in seven states. After being arrested along with several other senior 'subjects', Fitzek was accused by Alexander Dobrindt, German's interior minister, of 'undermining the rule of law' and spreading 'antisemitic conspiracy narratives to back up their supposed claim to authority'. His organisation, the Kingdom of Germany, has been banned. 'Today, a significant blow was struck against the so-called Reich Citizens and Self-Governors,' Dobrindt wrote on X. 'With the so-called 'Kingdom of Germany,' the largest association of this scene, which has been growing for years, was banned.' Dobrindt's tweet is a reminder of the strange, overlapping world of extremist German nostalgics. Abutting the Venn diagram of Fitzek's 'subjects' is the much larger circle of some 25,000 Reichsbürger ('Reich Citizens') who also deny the legitimacy of the country's 1949 constitution and want to re-establish a monarchy that was deposed in 1918. They have been under observation by the BfV since 2016, when one of its members shot dead a police officer during a raid at his home. The Covid lockdown in 2020 swelled their ranks – and their extremism. An attempted coup 'People spent a lot of time in isolation, in front of computers,' explains Jakob Guhl, an expert in far-Right extremism at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue. ' Chat forums, such as Telegram, which are [largely] unregulated, saw a huge inflow of anti-vaccine people and far-Right groups. Part of that mix was Reichsbürger, and there was suddenly a far larger audience.' According to German government figures, Reichsbürger committed 1,000 extremist criminal acts in 2021, a twofold increase from the previous year. Officials estimate that 10 per cent of its members are potentially violent and five per cent Right-wing extremists. 'The ideology of rejecting state authority and holding historical revisionist ideas, many of them anti-Semitic, always had the potential to unload itself very badly,' says Guhl. As Covid ebbed and flowed, this first manifested itself in protestors attempting to storm the parliament building in Berlin in August 2020, while waving the pre-1918 flag of the German Empire. The following April, the police foiled a plot by a group calling themselves United Patriots, a subset of the Reichsbürger movement, who wanted to kidnap the health minister, foster a civil war and overthrow the democratic system. Four men aged 46 to 58 and a 77-year-old former teacher were jailed in March this year. The most infamous manifestation of the Reichsbürgers' violent, revisionist intentions was an attempted coup in December 2022, foiled by 5,000 police officers operating in 11 of Germany's 16 states, the largest such operation since 1945. The plot contained many farcical elements, notably a belief that Elizabeth II was part of a global, child-abusing elite and a cast of conspirators that included minor aristocrats, a chef and an opera singer. However, its deadly intentions were apparent from the discovery of 380 guns, 350 bladed weapons and more than 148,000 rounds of ammunition. Its alleged members, whose trials started last year and are still ongoing, included a former AfD member of the Bundestag and a founding member of the German special forces. Interviewed by the BBC shortly after the attempted coup, Fitzek said he had no intention of doing something similar himself (although he did describe the German state as 'destructive and sick', adding he had 'no interest in being part of this fascist and satanic system'). It is, however, interesting to note that some of the conspirators espoused the same historical views as the 'Kingdom of Germany', notably the self-proclaimed Heinrich XIII, a 73-year-old prince from the House of Reuss, who was alleged to have been central to their plans. Under-35s most likely to want return of the monarchy Prince Reuss, whose family ruled parts of Thuringia until 1918, has recorded videos complaining that his '1,000-year dynasty' had been unjustly usurped. His co-conspirators allegedly shared a vision of returning Germany to elements of its Bismarckian constitutional settlement – a sentiment which enjoys a low but substantial level of support across Germany. Recent polls have shown that almost 10 per cent of the population would like to see the return of the monarchy, a figure that doubles for those under the age of 34. 'The Second Reich is a bit less problematic than harking back to the Nazis,' explains Guhl. 'It doesn't have the same level of toxicity attached to it. The symbols don't tend to be banned; the flags won't necessarily get you into trouble. It's a past that's easier to idealise for movements that want an idealised version of the past.' But this idealised version of the Second Reich ignores the reality of a new country riven by political and cultural divisions and destroyed in the First World War by the Kaiser's ham-fisted Weltpolitik. And as Dobrindt, the interior minister said of Fitzek's arrest this week: 'We are not talking about a group of harmless nostalgics, as the title of the organisation might suggest, but about criminal structures and a criminal network.' There is also an argument that these German nostalgics, however ill-intentioned, would benefit from a better grasp of the historical period they claim to fetishise. The Kaiser died unhappily in exile in 1941, rejected by his own people. Even at the start of the second Reich, a mere Prussian aristocrat knew how to put minor royalty in its place. When Bismarck, the German chancellor, was unifying Germany in 1870, he placated the reluctant King Ludwig of II of Bavaria by offering him his own separate postal service – and little else.
