Faeser told the newspaper that the number of people who the Office for the Protection of the Constitution currently assigns to the Reich citizen milieu has risen by 2000 to 23,000 people compared to the previous year. Ten percent are therefore considered violent. Last year, 239 acts of violence by Reich citizens were registered.
With a view to the current strike by the authorities against a network of suspected conspirators and extremists, the minister also warned against trivializing. “We are not dealing with harmless crackpots, but with terror suspects who are now all in custody.” The government will “soon further tighten the German weapons law”.
On Wednesday, the police and the Federal Public Prosecutor took action with several thousand forces nationwide against a suspected terrorist network of Reich citizens who are said to have planned a violent overthrow. There are more than 50 accused; among the suspects are also an active soldier and reservists as well as the former AfD member of parliament and Berlin judge Birgit Malsack-Winkemann.
CSU regional group leader Alexander Dobrindt (CSU) called for “clear” regulations to remove extremists with ideas for subversion from public service. “I think anyone planning a coup cannot work for this state,” Dobrindt said on Deutschlandfunk. If someone “in a Reichsbürger community rejects this state on principle, that must be sufficient to then remove him from the civil service”.
At the same time, Dobrindt spoke out in favor of greater monitoring of the entire AfD by the Office for the Protection of the Constitution at the federal level. There has “always” been the “suspicious situation” that anti-democratic tendencies were known in the party and the parliamentary group, he said. Now “the clear proof” was led to it. That must be “sufficient reason” for the security authorities to “take a closer look” there.
Lower Saxony’s Interior Minister Boris Pistorius (SPD) warned of increasing right-wing extremism in the ranks of the AfD. “Something is happening in the party,” he told the “Bild am Sonntag”. Even in the party’s state associations, which were relatively moderate a few years ago, there is now “a clear movement towards right-wing extremism,” Pistorius told the newspaper.
In his opinion, the time for an AfD ban procedure had not yet come, added the Lower Saxony minister. “But we have to look, examine and collect so that we don’t miss the point.”
At the same time, Pistorius warned against strategically designed recruitment attempts by the AfD in the security and judicial authorities. “In general, the AfD is trying to do the same thing that the NSDAP did in the late 1920s: to penetrate the security organs, the judiciary. The AfD is doing this in a very targeted and strategic way.” On the other hand, the police must be strengthened.
Bavaria’s Interior Minister Joachim Herrmann (CSU) told the radio station Bayern 2 that it was known that the Reich Citizens’ Movement was promoting itself in the security sector. In his federal state, too, there have already been cases in which supporters of the Reich Citizenship ideology have been removed from the police force. It is also important that every single citizen and every authority from the tax office to the district office report “Reich citizen activities”.
The left in the Bundestag demanded quick information from the federal government on the extent of the threat. Faeser must inform the Bundestag “promptly” about “the threat to democracy posed by networks of Reich citizens and other right-wing extremists,” said parliamentary secretary Jan Korte on Saturday. On Monday, several Bundestag committees will deal with the recently uncovered conspiracy network from the Reich citizen scene.
