He wanted to be regent, but it was only enough for ringleader. Heinrich Reuss, or as he saw himself: Heinrich XIII, is arrested before his suspected group of conspirators could start a coup attempt. If it weren’t also a matter of life and death, it would have been ridiculous.
In his estate in Frankfurt, Heinrich Reuss was waiting to finally be able to rule over Germany, perhaps as a king, at any rate as a monarch. With his clique of like-minded people, he wanted to take power – Olaf Scholz, Robert Habeck, Christian Lindner should do what his ancestors had to do: abdicate. But things turned out differently. The chancellor and his ministers are still in office, Reuss is handcuffed. It is 10.40 a.m. when masked emergency services in bulletproof vests lead the 71-year-old out of his property on Frankfurt’s Fichardstrasse.
It seems crazy what the man with the slicked-back hair was up to. The idea that he and his comrades-in-arms actually took power in the country seems absurd. The fact that “the people” would have joined them, that the police and the armed forces should throw away 70 years of democracy and happily offer themselves to a new monarchy – that was pipe dreams. But it would have shaken the republic to the core if crazy Reich citizens had broken into the Reichstag and shot people there.
According to the Attorney General, the conspirators accepted that there would have been deaths. First and foremost Reuss, because he headed their “council”, which would later become the government. From the scant information that the investigators have revealed so far, contempt for human beings peeps out. In such ideologies, great historical events – and for Heinrich and his followers it was about saving the fatherland – result in people dying.
There are recordings of the would-be regent presenting his view of the monarchy at a right-wing extremist conference in Switzerland in 2019. There he emphasized that his family, the House of Reuss, had ruled in Gera and the surrounding area for a thousand years – and not just for a “legislature period of five years”. Five years versus a thousand years, he seems to find that ridiculous. But it seems rather ridiculous when the scion claims in the same lecture that “everything was fine in the principality and the people lived a happy life” until the end of the monarchy in 1918. If there was a problem, you went to the prince and he took care of it.
All of the Reichsbürger gibberish over the last hundred years is one big conspiracy myth. The Americans are said to have financed Hitler, the Federal Republic is only a US protectorate and in the background the Jews are said to be pulling the strings everywhere. The victim? The Germans and especially the nobility who eventually had to flee from the Soviets in East Germany. Attack on Poland, gas chambers, murder, death, torture in Eastern Europe, all the atrocities of the Nazis and the Second World War – not the fault of the nobility, says Heinrich Reuss. The authorities classified him as a danger.
It is unknown how Reuss convinced his comrades-in-arms. It’s also not clear if he was the driving force at all. It is not to be expected that he would have won over the masses. Not only because hardly anyone knew him until today. Fraternizing with the rabble was obviously not his thing: the prince expected to be greeted first, if you please. He was arrogant, is heard from Thuringia, where he owns a hunting lodge. A funny bird. Or, as a spokesman for his family put it: “a partly confused old man who is caught up in conspiracy theory misconceptions”.
Since reunification, Reuss has been trying to get a piece of the old days back. He sued to get possessions back from a thousand years of rule over Gera and the surrounding area, and according to Zeit Online was initially successful. But he failed to bring properties such as the Gera Art Nouveau Theater and estates back into the family. The report quotes a family member as saying that Reuss became a Reich citizen because he lost the “fight of his life” over his family’s claims for restitution.
It is not known when he switched from the former family estate in Thuringia to the whole of Germany. But even these megalomaniacal claims remain unsatisfied. Instead of becoming the next monarch, Heinrich Reuss has to answer for membership in a terrorist organization.
