Latest news with #SecondReich
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. 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Budapest Times
20-04-2025
- Politics
- Budapest Times
Expedience to fore as ex-royals jostle to return
Your family – your dynastic family – the Hohenzollerns, has reigned in Brandenburg-Prussia from 1415 to 1918 and in imperial Germany from 1871 to 1918. But Kaiser Wilhelm II leads the country into the First World War in 1914, and defeat in November 1918. The Wilhelmine Empire then collapses like a house of cards, and the Kaiser and Crown Prince flee into Dutch exile. Can one of the most powerful families in Europe find a way back to eminence? The post-Great War revolution in a shattered Germany abolished the monarchy and introduced the democratic but shaky Weimar Republic of 1919 to 1933, and both the former crown prince and the potential dictator Adolf Hitler began agitating against the government at about the same time, in the first half of the 1920s, both men enemies of democracy. After Hitler became Chancellor in 1933, questions were asked about the links between the German Empire of the Hohenzollerns from 1871 to 1918, known as the Second Reich, and authoritarian National Socialism, the latter founded in 1920 and intended to be Hitler's 'Thousand-Year Third Reich' but lasting only 12 years until defeat in World War Two in 1945. The central thrust of Stephan Malinowski's book examines how the mileus of ex-crown prince Friedrich Wilhelm and Adolf Hitler converged, and how various segments of the anti-democratic Right in Germany collaborated. The matter sparked intense public debate in 1991 when Louis Ferdinand – the eldest son of Wilhelm and at his birth in 1907 the third in line to the Kaiserreich – petitioned the freshly unified German government for compensation. Although the Weimar Republic had allowed the Hohenzollerns to keep most of their many assets, the family fortunes changed in 1945 when the Soviet Red Army conquered the eastern half of Germany and seized their lands, castles and possessions. With the post-Cold War offer of compensation to individuals and families, the former royals claimed assets worth hundreds of millions of euros. A decision was complicated by a 1994 law barring restitution for the descendants of those who 'significantly abetted' the Nazi regime. The success or otherwise of the claim would hinge on the actions of ex-crown prince Wilhelm, the eldest of the six sons of Kaiser Wilhelm II, and the question of whether he and others in the family directly or indirectly supported National Socialism and Hitler's rise to power. Did the House of Hohenzollern do so? Malinowshi was appointed by the Ministry of Finance in Potsdam in 2014 to write an expert evaluation, one of many historians commissioned by authorities to do so. Malinowski was born in Berlin in 1966 and has studied and taught history in Germany, France, Italy, the United States and Ireland. He is Professor of Modern European History at the University of Edinburgh and the author of 'Nazis and Nobles: The History of a Misalliance' in 2020. His new book was published as 'Die Hohenzollern und die Nazis' in Germany in 2021, becoming a bestseller there and winning the German Non-Fiction Prize in 2022. The jury deemed it excellently researched and brilliantly told, and with further importance in inspiring social debate. Now it has been translated to English by Jefferson Chase, as Chase has done with some 40 other German books. Malinowski focuses on three generations of the German royal family – that of Kaiser Wilhelm II (born 1859-died 1941), that of his eldest son, Crown Prince Friedrich Wilhelm (1882-1951) and that of the latter's six children, among whom his second son, Louis Ferdinand (1907-1994), also possessed great historical significance, in seeking the compensation. As the author recounts, when the Kaiser scurried off into exile in the Netherlands, he would never return to his homeland. And yet, the assumption that this was the end of the situation, and he and his heirs were silent and without influence in the following years, or that the Hohenzollern voice was limited to silly spats between a forgotten emperor and an upstart Austrian in a battle of epic narcissism, is wrong. Malinowski's answer regarding collaboration is unequivocal, an emphatic 'yes'. When the 'Third Reich' was being built, he assesses, the family and the Nazi movement forged a symbolic political alliance. Kaiser Wilhelm II had six sons and a daughter, and Malinowski finds that of the five Hohenzollern brothers, Prince August Wilhelm was definitely worst. The post-First World War years in Germany were anarchic, politically and economically, with rival political gangs brawling on the streets. August Wilhelm (1887-1949) was a convinced Nazi who joined the party in 1930, and was present when the Sturmabteilung – Storm Troopers, or Brownshirts, the SA – tortured their political opponents in an improvised facility in 1933, and he later inspected the Dachau concentration camp. His older brother, the ex-crown prince, did not go that far but he did turn up at all the right moments in the pivotal 1933. Before Hitler had been Chancellor for a week, he got his first public chance. On February 5 that year, the joint funeral of a police sergeant and the leader of a particularly vicious SA squad was held. The two men had been killed in Charlottenburg on the night of January 30. In a show of strength, 4000 Storm Troopers, with police, machine-guns and floodlights in support, had marched through the district. The funeral was held with great spectacle in Berlin Cathedral, the policeman's coffin draped in the old flag of the German Empire, the Storm Trooper's with the swastika. Former crown prince Wilhelm, dressed in Nazi uniform, laid a wreath on each coffin. Up to 500,000 people braved the rain to pay their respects as the funeral cortege moved slowly down the roads leading from the cathedral to the Invaliden cemetery, three kilometres distant. Wilhelm did not join them but he was much photographed by reporters both inside the cathedral, where he sat in the front row next to Hitler, and outside in conversation with government Minister Hermann Göring at the top of the steps. The press coverage was not just a national and provincial affair. It was discussed at length in The New York Times , under the headline 'Strange things happen in Germany'. Six weeks later, the ex-crown prince joined Hitler, Field Marshal August von Mackensen and President Hindenburg at the Day of Potsdam, the re-opening of the Reichstag, in which the Nazis choreographed the merger of their upstart regime with the old monarchical elites. To complete the symbolic ambiguities, Hitler wore tails and Wilhelm wore his Nazi uniform. An empty chair was placed for the deposed emperor, uninvited from his enforced retirement in Doorn in the Netherlands, where he died in 1941 after attacking the Jews, the western allies, the Weimar Republic and the surrounding trees. His son had returned from exile in 1923, with the way paved for him by Chancellor Gustav Stresemann. Photographs in the book show the returned former royal in the company of leading Nazis, including Hitler, and with swastika armbands on his military uniform. In text and photos, masterly researched, Malinowski presents what must be the definitive account of the Hohenzollerns during the Weimar and Nazi years, showing the family's roles in anti-democratic right-wing circles, re-inventing themselves in a 'de-aristocratized society', the deals they struck with the National Socialist state and their attemps since 1945 to convince democratic, post-war Germany to buy into a self-serving revised telling of history.
