Sixty years old, with a sympathy for the AfD and a passion for astrology, Hildegard Leiding would have entered the government if the Reichsbürger (the citizens of the Reich) had managed to carry out the coup they planned to overthrow German institutions.
Instead of that of a ministry, the woman walked through the door of the court in Munich, where the third trial of this case began yesterday. right-wing extremism network which the police disbanded in a large-scale operation in December 2022.
Then 26 people were arrested. Two trials are already underway: one in Stuttgart, where the commanders of the “military wing” are accused, and one in Frankfurt, where the leaders of the group have ended up on trial, including the Rhenish aristocrat Heinrich XIII Prinz Reuß, the man who should have led the country after the coup.
In the Munich proceedings, however, members of the«esoteric wing» of the Reichsbürger, eight people in total. In addition to Leiding (who should have become “minister of transcommunications”), they ended up in front of the judges also an Austrian chef — identified by the astrologer during a seance — who had been entrusted with the task of ensuring a healthy diet for the “new” Germany of the “citizens of the Reich”, and a doctor, who became passionate about divination during the pandemic — with a particular interest in ovomancy, or the art of predicting the future by observing egg yolks — and destined to become “minister of health” (perhaps a recognition for having donated 47 thousand euros to the organization).
The first sentences, both in the Munich trial and in the other two, will arrive in 2025. Defense lawyers argue that the charges of terrorism and treason are excessive and that their clients are just conspiracists, brought together in a group during the pandemic by the rejection of the restrictions. According to the investigators, however, the thousand documents recovered and the weapons caches discovered demonstrate something else: that the Reichsbürger they were preparing to attack the Bundestag, weapons in hand, to kidnap Chancellor Olaf Scholz and to impose a new state with violence. All in the name of four “dogmas”: the German empire never dissolved; the constitution of the Federal Republic has no legal validity; today’s Germany is not a state but a private corporation; Germany is still under Allied control.
Movement born in the 1980s, today the “citizens of the Reich” would be more than twenty thousand throughout the country: the majority “oppose” the Federal Republic by not paying taxes and not respecting the laws, while a small portion – a thousand members – are considered a “danger to democracy”.
