The German Minister of the Interior Horst Seehofer (CSU) has for the first time banned a grouping of „Reich citizens“. In the early morning hours, police officers searched the apartments of leading members of the “United German Nations and Tribes” association and its sub-organization “Osnabrück Landmark” in ten federal states.
The members of the association „express their intolerance towards democracy through racism, anti-Semitism and historical revisionism,“ said the Interior Ministry.
Resistance to state violence
The „citizens of the Reich“ are deniers of state who do not recognize the Federal Republic and therefore mostly do not pay taxes, among other things. Some of these groups refer to a self-defined “natural law”, others to the historical German Empire. Many of them claim that the Federal Republic is actually not a state but a company.
They do not recognize laws and authorities and sometimes violently resist government measures. According to the Office for the Protection of the Constitution, there are said to be around 19,000 members of this scene nationwide, the members of which are considered to be gun-savvy.
Wanted to „take over“ town hall
In recent years, the grouping has attracted attention, among other things, through “verbally aggressive writing”. The addressees were threatened with “imprisonment” and “kinship”. The focus of the actions of the small group „United German Peoples and Tribes“ was most recently Berlin. For example, she tried to „take over“ the town hall in the Zehlendorf district.
According to the police, her members also vigorously and threatened for early release of Horst Mahler, a terminally ill Holocaust denier convicted of sedition.
