BERLIN (Reuters) – Hundreds of police officers were conducting raids across Germany early on Tuesday after the interior ministry banned a hard-right militant group it referred to as the biggest arm of the so-called Reichsbuerger (Citizens of the Reich) movement.
The raids in seven federal states took place in properties associated with the Koenigreich Deutschland (Kingdom of Germany) group and the homes of its leading members on Tuesday, the ministry said.
Interior Minister Alexander Dobrindt said the group’s 6,000 members had created a “counter-state” in Germany and were undermining the legal system and the state’s monopoly on the use of force.
“They underpin their supposed claim to power with antisemitic conspiracy narratives,” Dobrindt said.
The order to ban the group was made just before the raids, the ministry said.
Germany’s domestic intelligence service Verfassungsschutz put the Reichsbuerger movement under observation in 2016, shortly after one of its members shot dead a policeman during a raid at his home.
Its adherents believe that today’s German democracy is an illegitimate facade and that they are citizens of a monarchy which, they maintain, endured after Germany’s defeat in World War One, despite its formal abolition.
(Writing by Friederike Heine; Editing by Andrew Heavens)
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