Europe | The unhappy prince

German police arrest two dozen alleged conspirators in a hare-brained plot to overthrow the government

Investigators say a coup d’état was being planned

During a raid against so-called "Reich citizens", masked police officers lead Prince Reuss (M) to a police vehicle after searching a house of Heinrich XIII. He wears handcuffs. The Federal Prosecutor's Office had several people from the so-called Reichsbürger scene arrested in the course of a raid on Wednesday morning. Numerous officers were deployed in several federal states, said a spokeswoman for the Karlsruhe authority .
|Berlin

IT COULD HAVE been an episode of “Babylon Berlin”, a TV drama in which the Schwarze Reichswehr, a cabal of far-right military officers, plots a coup against the Weimar Republic to bring back the monarchy. At the crack of dawn on December 7th some 3,000 police and special-forces officers carried out raids in 11 states across Germany to arrest 25 suspected members of a group that was allegedly planning to topple the “deep state” the plotters believe is ruling the country. Even some of the characters involved resembled “Babylon Berlin” ones: there is a prince, a judge and a former commander of a special unit of the armed forces.

This article appeared in the Europe section of the print edition under the headline “The unhappy prince”

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