Dan Snow's History Hit - Germany's Extreme Monarchists

Episode Date: December 16, 2022

Last week a celebrity chef, former police officers and serving army officers were arrested in Germany as part of an extremist coup to overthrow the government. The 'Reichsbürger' group has been described as a 'right-wing terrorist cell' by German media and was targeted by over 3000 police officers in an enormous raid that uncovered rifles, ammunition and personnel gathering. The group's aim was to reinstate the German monarchy with a hereditary prince, and right-wing conspiracy theorist Heinrich XIII as head of state. The 71-year-old is a descendent of the Hohenzollern dynasty, part of the German monarchy deposed in 1918 after the disastrous First World War.To make sense of the news, Dan speaks to Anglo-German historian and author Katja Hoyer about Germany's relationship with its historical monarchy, the roots of the coup and the influence of QAnon and Trumpian conspiracy theories in galvanising far-right groups in Germany.Produced by Mariana Des Forges and mixed by John Rogers.If you'd like to learn more, we have hundreds of history documentaries, ad-free podcasts and audiobooks at History Hit - subscribe to History Hit today!Download History Hit app from the Google Play store.Download History Hit app from the Apple Store.

Hi everybody, welcome to Dan Snow's History. Last week, the first week of December 2022, saw an event that few predicted. It's been a turbulent year folks and I thought we might stagger through to the end of December without another absolute clanger, but no, Germany had a treat for us. A collection of people, including a celebrity gourmet chef, former police officers, judges, serving army officers worryingly. A bizarre collection of people from right across Germany were targeted by 3,000 police officers. They found rifles. They found ammunition. They were responding to credible evidence that a monarchist group was about to launch a coup in Germany. Yes, a group seeking to return Germany into a monarchy. You

just can't make this stuff up. The plan was to install a 71-year-old aristocrat who was arrested sporting a fairly ridiculous tweed jacket and just looking, for all intents and purposes, like a grand old toff. The plan was to install him as head of state. I think this was a case we didn't quite know whether to laugh or cry when we saw this news. It was an absolutely extraordinary blast from the past. The idea that Germans want to reconnect with their monarchical regime pre-1918. A regime that saw Germany plunged into the First World War with catastrophic consequences for Germany, the German people, and Europe. Few people, I didn't know anybody, I really didn't know anyone held a candle for the Hohenzollern family in Kaiser Wilhelm,

but apparently some people out there still do. And to find out more about them, we're going to go to Katja Heusch, who's been on this podcast before. She's written many great and wonderful books about German history. She came on to talk me through this coup attempt, what these people want, what the rest of Germany wants, and what Germany really thinks of its deposed royal family. This is a weird one, folks. Enjoy. Katya, thanks very much for coming back on the podcast.

Thanks for having me. Again. I had a lot of stuff in my bingo car for 2022. I didn't have this one. I did not have a revanchiste monarchist putsch. First of all, outline what the hell happened for this audience of people listening to this all over the world. the hell happened for this audience of people listening to this all over the world uh yeah so the german government did the first oh sorry the biggest ever uh sort of police raid against political extremists in modern german history really sending out over 3 000 police officers to

look into 150 properties um to basically uh foil as they uh it, a coup attempt against the current German government. So this is by a group of people who believe that the current German government, as it is in the current German constitution, has no legitimacy. And they were basically gathering arms and personnel and resources to try and install the government that they think should run Germany. Now, and the government that should run Germany, is it the Hohenzollerns? Is it the royal family that ruled Germany up until 1918? Or is it a different branch?

There are many German royals, as we know, from studying 18th and 19th century history, and there's almost a limited number of German royals. Who are the German royals they sought to put back in charge of Germany? Well, this depends a little bit on who you ask. So which of the group members you ask, because it's quite a splintered group. So the so-called Reichsbürger who are associated with this coup basically believe that the constitution of 1918, so at the end of the First World War, when indeed the Hohenzollerns were still in charge under Kaiser Wilhelm II, should be restored.

Now, the problem that they have is that the current head of the Hohenzollern family, Georg Friedrich, who is Kaiser Wilhelm's great grandson, hasn't really affiliated himself with that movement and isn't all that keen on the idea, or he's certainly not said that he would kind of spearhead a government should they manage to put one in place. And so they're effectively looking for any royal, really, it would seem, from any of the royal families to take over. And they found a kind of member of a minor royal family or kind of noble family, aristocratic family in Thuringia

in a man called Heinrich XIII of the House of Reuss, who they approached this time and who was supposed to spearhead this government that they were going to put in place. You think of Germany as one of the most, despite its turbulent history, one of the most mature democracies really in the world. Does this come as a shock to you? This is a gigantic police operation. This is a serious deal here.

Were they actually worried that these clowns would take over the country? I don't think it was so much the case that they had a realistic chance of actually taking over the country. I mean, if you follow that thought experiment for a little bit. So let's assume they'd managed to get hold of a significant amount of weapons and had actually managed to get into the parliament building, into the Bundestag, as they planned. You know, there would still have been an entire state behind that. And so the plan was basically to create chaos,

to attack vital infrastructure, to create blackouts and things like that, and then hope that the German people and particularly the security forces, so police and army would rise, you know, because they're also angry and disaffected, supposedly to the same degree, they would rise and join them. And I think that's where the problem is. They assume that everybody is as angry and as disaffected as they are. And I just do not see that being the case. But having said that, it is a dangerous movement because for the first time, I think it's taken on a form where, you know, the level of organization, the fact that they've actually approached and managed to approach members of

the armed forces, both currently serving and kind of, you know, previous soldiers and commanders, and the fact that that gives them a degree of organization and particularly access to weapons and funds that they didn't have before does make them dangerous. As we've seen in the US with the storming of the Capitol building, you don't have to be successful to undermine people's belief in democracy. Let's go back to 1918 now. Let's do the history. Why do these people feel that what happened in 1918 was illegitimate let's let's the german royal house the hohenzollerns kaiser wilhelm one of the most powerful monarchs in the world commanding an empire big extra european empire but also even in europe an

empire that stretched from well you know alsace-lorraine modern-day france right the way across into modern-day r a huge Central European empire, on the losing side in the First World War. And tell me what happened at the end of that war, and how did it affect the royal family in particular? So the war obviously ended rather badly for Germany. And the hardship, particularly the kind of economic hardship that came with that was so severe that many people in Germany were very badly affected by diseases. There was the Spanish flu going around, but also just the malnutrition that was caused by the shortages in the war caused a lot of severe hardship. So that anger that the population felt, also the huge casualty figures in the war,

began to be targeted towards Wilhelm to a large degree. And so you end up with kind of people going out on the streets, mass strikes, and that contributed in the end to the so-called German Revolution at the end of the war in 1918, whereby Kaiser Wilhelm II was forced to abdicate. There was also significant Allied pressure. So the Americans in particular said that there'd only be peace if Germany gets rid of its royal family and installs a kind of republican form of democracy. And so these people now feel that this isn't a legitimate regime change. So on the one hand side brought about by the violence on the streets, by the revolutionaries, and on the other side by kind of foreign pressure, if you will, throughson in the u.s who said that there wouldn't be peace unless william is gone

and so they feel that that was a coup attempt and that that constitution was never legally kind of changed into into the new form and so they go back some of them that is go back to that particular point and say no actually that constitution has never gone away. It's still in place. The Kaiser regime within Germany kind of collapsed, right? The sailors in Wilhelmshaven refused to obey their orders. There was a revolution. The Kaiser escaped. He was almost lucky to have escaped with his life. So it's always been seen as a kind of closed chapter of history,

that the Kaiser was unpopular. Germany was looking for something different, defeated, experiencing terrible hardship. To me and you, the case for monarchical Germany seemed to depart with the Kaiser in the autumn of 1918, right? Yes. And I mean, most people still see it exactly the same way. So, you know, in the way that the rest of the world is shocked and and somewhat um bemused by by what happened in germany i think the same goes for germans as well like the vast majority of of people you know find the whole idea peculiar that you'd want to go back to 1918 of all um periods and in time and kind of restore a regime that nobody has experienced in their lifetime it's not even like you've got old people who sit there and say,

this was all a lot better and let's go back to the good old days. This is virtually out of living memory. So that kind of surprise was there, I would say, in Germany as well, not just abroad. Is it just a lost cause? It will always attract some people. I mean, has it ever been strong? Has it ever been in any way mainstream, even in the 20s and 30s, as Germany sought a new constitution?

It was in the 20s and 30s, because people did look back to sort of pre-1914 rather than pre-1918 history as the good old days, quite literally, when you think, you know, Germany was one of the most prosperous and wealthy societies in the world before the First World War and world leading in lots of fields, like, I don't know, modern industries in particular, like the chemical industry, electrical goods, that kind of thing. So it was seen as a kind of modern economy that was doing very well. People were getting reasonable wages. The education system was one

of the best in the world, producing massive literacy rates and all the rest of it. So the Kaiser, in a way, to some people stood in for, or kind of stood for, exemplified that wealth and the status that Germany had achieved in such a short time since its unification. You can also see that in the way that, for instance, Paul von Hindenburg was elected as the German president in 1925 and was seen as a kind of Ersatz Kaiser by many Germans. He was a replacement for what they couldn't have back. But most people drew the line in 1945 and said, let's start with something completely new, both East and West. So where East Germany sort of said, we now want to have the better Germany, let's create a socialist Germany, because all the previous stuff hasn't worked.

West Germany went through this liberal democracy thing that we tried in 1848 and haven't really been able to establish. But, you know, 1945 was seen as aligned by the vast majority of people there in terms of going back. Are the memories of the Kaiser Fondest in the ancestral traditional lands of the Hohenzollerns? No, it's actually quite interesting that there's more support for this kind of thing in East Germany, in the former East. I think that's largely due to the fact that people feel, because of the economic deprivation

and various other factors, they don't feel as affiliated. They feel sort of left behind or ostracized by the government in Berlin. And I don't think it's necessarily specific to you, like resurrection of the monarchy, what their problem is. I think it's more a kind of disaffection with liberal democracy as it stands, and then looking for ways of legitimizing that, you know, legally and historically speaking. So it tends to be stronger in the East. Having said that, this raid that was happening last week was very much a kind of nationwide thing. So the police looked into properties in 11 out of the 16 states.

So it's pretty much across the board. Is there any sort of sane democratic movement to do something similar to this? Or is this just way out of the lim? Is this an extreme version of a lively strand of political debate? Are there any parties who wish to see Germany becoming a monarchy once again?

There are some sort of restoration kind of organisations, if you will, and they look back to different royal families and do it in a peaceful manner but they're so small i wouldn't even say that that is an actual movement so there are kind of individual clubs and societies where people meet up and and talk about you know the royal traditions and things but there isn't from them there isn't a serious attempt to try and uh sort of re-establish a um yeah sort of monarchy. The bigger movement that is perhaps peaceful but still odd is the so-called sort of self-administrators. So they kind of don't

believe that any of the state structures exist because the state doesn't exist. So therefore, if you want, say, a passport or you want to get married, the state can't do it for you because the state doesn't exist. So therefore, they effectively print their own passports. They get sort of local people to, you know, do some sort of bogus course so that they can now administer things like weddings and funerals and sort of do it themselves as an act of resistance against the current state. So there's that movement, the so-called selbstverwalter or self-administrators, which you could say is a somewhat more peaceful way of doing this, but equally strange. I'm Matt Lewis. And I'm Dr. Alan Orjanaga. And in Gone Medieval, we get into the greatest mysteries. To be continued... the best of friends. Murder, rebellions, and crusades. Find out who we really were

by subscribing to Gone Medieval from History Hit, wherever you get your podcasts. If you look at this, if you look at this coup attempt, if you look at extremism in Britain, if you look at the US, is this the internet guarantee? Is it Russian money? Is it bored billionaires, social media? Or has it ever been thus? Do you think there were always turbulent groups vying for control? This is just another chapter in the colourful history of Europe. I think that's always been around. I mean, when you look at statistics, there's a residual small minority,

about 10% or so that want the resurrection of the monarchy in Germany one way or another, at least they say so in surveys, whether it would actually come to that basically if they were kind of asked tomorrow, would you vote for a monarchist party? It's a different thing. I think what the internet perhaps adds to it is a degree of organization so if you're like some weirdo and you're sitting in some village and you're the

only one who thinks like that then you might just keep your thoughts to yourself and write them in a diary or whatever but you haven't really got a means of of easily sort of connecting with other people whilst now you join this vast network um on telegram and other sort of you know social media channels where you connect with people who think just like you and it kind of confirms you know your thoughts so if you're already sitting there thinking the state doesn't exist and actually if you look at the constitution there's a clause in there that it was only going to be temporary and then you find somebody else who thinks exactly the same thing.

It sort of confirms that, you know, you're not insane to you. So effectively, I think this allows people to connect with others better than perhaps previously has previously been the case. What has been the reception in Germany of this news? Has it been the kind of amused disbelief that we've had elsewhere or is it pretty scary? I think initially it was very scary. And when you look at the response from politicians, those were quite robust words. People were saying a new level has been reached and we need to, what was the word that one of the defence experts said something along the lines of, we need to evaporate this brown soup, referring to sort of the Nazi shirts and the colour of them.

So, you know, quite a strong response initially. But the media have since come up with a strange sort of debate along the lines of, you know, was this all blown out of proportion? And really, they could never have succeeded. So what's the big deal? And I think that's quite dangerous. Like I say, they don't need to succeed to be dangerous. If they get hold of weapons and they manage to get into the parliament building with weapons, you only need a handful of people to do a lot of damage there, both psychologically and in real terms.

So this debate was initially, I think, very much one of shock and what do we do about this and has now gone to let's weigh up and let's see. And perhaps it wasn't all that bad, which I find a little bit troubling. It feels to me like 99 years after the Munich Beer Hall Putsch, the failed Nazi Putsch takeover Germany in 1923, it feels to me the lesson to draw from that isn't, oh, well, these little right-wing fringe groups, let them have their fun. Let's not come down too hard on them.

Yeah, that's my concern as well. And people say, you know, but the Nazis weren't a fringe group. They were already several million strong when they came into power but that isn't the point they were around throughout the 1920s and people said exactly the same thing about them they are just a bunch of kind of you know crackpots and lunatics and and look at them and they're strange at the coup attempt that was never going to work um so you know the the very fact that these groups are out there and are arming themselves and are getting organised, I think should trouble people.

And also the fact that they are getting more support now than they used to have. I mean, they've been around since the 1980s and have never bothered anybody because they're just there and doing their thing. But if they're now willing to use violence and discuss this and get people on board who, on board to know how to procure weapons and how to use them and how to organise kind of like a campaign or invasion of a building, then that is worrying. family fortunes and he might get swept along in this goddamn coup attempt end up in prison it's like mary queen of scotts you've got to spend the whole time being very cautious here never make

sure you're not sending a dodgy email or letter right you want to be involved yeah it's also not helpful for them because uh they're currently trying to get a lot of their family um like fortune back um which was confiscated after the second world war so this isn't ideal sort of pr for them either if they are even vaguely implemented with this, you know, even if they don't have anything to do with it, it still kind of rubs off on them reputation wise. But to come back to your point about who are these people, are these kind of, I would almost say intellectuals and sort of conspiracists, or are they, you know, people left behind, people we've been reading about over the Trump debate and the Brexit debate?

Are these people experiencing economic hardship, like forebears in germany were in the terrible inflation of the 1920s and then the depression of the late 20s early 30s what worries me is that it's a bit of both and that was the same with the nazis as well so you know people always talk about the great depression as the thing that enabled them and it did but it wasn't the actual unemployed people voted for them you know actually the working classes and and the the lower social classes were underrepresented in in the people that supported nazism it was basically the fear of the middle classes and the upper classes of those unemployed that allowed people to um or the nazis to exploit those fears and

basically get them on board get the funding and so on and so forth. And most of the middle classes were overrepresented in that. And when you look today at the, at the Reichsbürger movement, you know, there's people like judges, former Bundeswehr commanders, teachers. So there was an old lady that was arrested a couple of weeks ago who, who was also a former teacher. And then, you know, it didn't really look like you'd imagine a terrorist to look like. Literally sort of in her 70s and arrested basically for plotting a terrorist coup. So the fact that this now goes through several social classes means that there's a lot of people

with access to funds and to kind of influence. And alongside, they can use the anger that is residual amongst those who feel left behind and feel kind of that, you know, the state isn't working for them economically. Yeah, I mean, there's been lots of work done on Trump supporters and QAnon supporters in particular, and insurrectionists who supported Trump and QAnon supporters. This is not a scream from the marginalized and dispossessed. These are reasonably affluent people who have just found themselves in a world of fake news and propaganda and hysteria. Yeah, and there's a direct link there as well. Germany is the biggest QAnon cell outside of the US, I think, certainly outside of the Anglosphere, you know, directly linking to them.

certainly outside of the Anglosphere, directly linking to them. So this is not just a similar movement, but you actually have QAnon chapters in Germany as well, who believe that, just like the American version, that Trump is the savior, who will basically get rid of this deep state conspiracy thing that is keeping the people down. So the same sort of thought processes you find in Germany as well, and they appeal to the same types of people. What will change, do you think, as a result of this? Is something a change in teaching in terms of the story that you tell yourselves about yourselves? I think it does. I mean, whether or not, I think there will be crackdowns. And I think they'll also look at some of the Bundeswehr units or the German military units that were potentially involved or allegedly involved with

this particularly the special um units under the the ksk so like the german sas if you will who've been under observation for a while because of extremist sort of tendencies within their units so that's going to happen but i think more importantly the german government and particularly mainstream political parties should ask themselves why there are so many people that feel disaffected and and you know what drives them into the arms of extremists and you know i'm obviously not going to say that that this is their their fault and it isn't but the problem is that people off the political fringes are there at local level they They're seen, they're heard, they engage with people in their communities, basically directly online and offline.

They're visible. Whilst people feel that political kind of heavyweights in Berlin don't care about them, they're not there, they don't come and speak to people. And this is something that I find quite troubling personally and that I feel needs to change. Yeah, that's interesting. Grassroots visibility of politicians

and representatives. Katja, thank you very much. I hope the Germans are aware that there are certain well-publicized members of the Windsor family who are currently maybe looking for an international role, who have had their ambitions

within the UK frustrated, and they could easily perhaps reignite their ties with their ancestral ties with Germany so if you are looking for members of the royal family to come and step in you've got some some spare just as just as German princes once populated the royal families of of the peripheries of Europe so uh so too now maybe we can give something back that's very kind of of you. Hey, no problem. Tell everyone what's your latest book. I have just finished writing a history of East Germany called Beyond the Wall,

which is a history of the GDR, of the East German state from 1949 to the fall of the Berlin Wall. And that'll be out in April next year. Well, you're going to come back on the podcast and tell us all about that, I hope. I will do, if you let me. You certainly will. Thank you, Katja.

Thanks. you