“Thirty years ago he was quite a modern, up-to-date and energetic entrepreneur,” the visibly nervous Prince Heinrich XIV Reuss-Koestritz told the MDR of his distant relative, Prince Heinrich XIII Reuss. However, the successive disappointments of life fueled his radicalization. Yet his relative would never have guessed that Heinrich XIII would be the driving force behind a planned coup in Germany.

And that’s what the German prosecutor’s office accuses the 71-year-old prince of. Investigators believe he led the political wing of the “Citizens of the Reich” (Reichsbuerger). He and 24 other members of the organization were arrested in an unprecedented police raid on Wednesday December 7. The group is suspected of having planned a coup, following which the monarchy was to be restored in Germany. Heinrich XIII Reuss was to become the head of the new state.

Zealous defender of the ideology of the “Citizens of the Reich”

The prince, a descendant of the old noble Reuss family, has not hidden his views for some time. Amazing proof of his radicalization is the speech he gave at the Worldwebforum 2019 conference in Zurich. It is difficult to say why he was allowed to express his thoughts in this particular place for nearly a quarter of an hour. Theoretically, the conference was to be about a revolution in the digital world, not about a revolution in Germany.

Despite this, Heinrich XIII was able publicly and freely to convince his audience that Germany as a sovereign subject of international law would have ceased to exist in 1918. The separation of powers in West Germany is an illusion. And politics is just a staged spectacle, the intention of which is to hide the fact that after the defeat of the First World War, sinister forces in the financial world turned Germany into a printing machine money.

It is precisely these theses which underlie the ideology which unites the movement of the “Citizens of the Reich”. However, during his speech in Zurich, Reuss also revealed personal flaws in his family’s history, which he called “a dispossessed dynasty after 1,000 years of rule”.

A family of countless Heinrichs

The Reuss family, although old and rich in tradition, is relatively unknown in Germany. About. In 1100, Roman Emperor Heinrich IV (Henryk IV Salicki) granted the family feudal lord status. Therefore, to this day, all male family members bear the name of Emperor Heinrich.

From the 12th century, the Reuss family ruled various lands that today lie within the borders of Bavaria, Thuringia, Saxony and Bohemia. From 1329, the Russ family bore princely titles. Many diplomats and officers come from the family, and even one of the Grand Masters of the Teutonic Order. Today, the detained budding putschist must be added to this long list.

Expropriation and loss of power

Like all German and Austrian aristocrats, the Reuss lost their claim to power after the end of World War I in 1918. Prince Heinrich XXVII Reuss, grandfather of Heinrich XIII, abdicated. The family lands were transformed into the short-lived state of Reuss, which in 1920, together with other regions, became part of Thuringia, part of the Weimar Republic. In 1945, when Thuringia found itself in the Soviet occupation zone, the property of the Reuss family was confiscated by the new communist authorities.

Thallwitz Castle in Saxony was returned to the Reuss family in 2008

Henry XIII was born in 1955, but he apparently never accepted the expropriation of his family after the war. In 2019, at a conference in Zurich, Reuss spoke of the happy people living under his family’s well-organized regime and the misery of those who later found themselves at the mercy of “Kafka’s democratic conditions”.

For decades, financing costly lawsuits, he tried in vain to recover the expropriated family properties. In Zurich, he admitted he now views his own legal efforts to recover expropriated properties as futile because, he claims, the judiciary and lawyers in Germany are in cahoots with the supposedly illegitimate government in Berlin. .

Fighting for the family legacy

Henry XIII probably spent a lot of time and money buying the family hunting lodge at Waidmannsheil, which was supposed to be a meeting place for would-be putschists. In addition, he also conducted court cases regarding former properties in the name of his mother, who died in 2019. Not without success, because in 2008 he managed to recover the castle of Thallwitz in Saxony.

Photo Description: Waidmannsheil hunting lodge – this is where the conspirators were supposed to meet

The family considered him lost

Prince Henry XIII had already had to move away from the family circle of 60 people in 2008. Prince Heinrich XIV Reuss-Koestritz said in an interview with the MDR that after his relative’s speech in Zurich he “definitely distanced himself from him”.

A similar reaction was triggered by an incident in August this year at a trade fair in the town of Bad Lobenstein in Thuringia. Prince Heinrich XIII was staying there with Uwe Thrum, an MP for the Populist Alternative for Germany, and Thomas Weigelt, the mayor at the time, when the latter suddenly attacked a journalist who was working on material on “citizens of the Reich”.