EXTREMISM“Terror Granny” Charged with Plotting German Civil War to Bring Back the Kaiser
A 75-year old retired theology professor was arrested and charged with organizing a nationalist, far-right terrorist group aiming to bring back the Kaiser. The group aimed to attack power stations and transmitters in order to plunge large parts of Germany into black out in the hope of promoting civic unrest.
A 75-year old retired theology professor at Gutenberg University in Mainz, Germany, was arrested last Thursday and flown in a police helicopter to Karlsruhe, where she was brought before a judge, charged with organizing a nationalist, far-right terrorist group aiming to bring back the Kaiser.
Dr. Ines Peterson, the federal prosecutor, said that Elizabeth R. — in Germany, press rules forbid identifying suspects until the beginning of a trial – has been charged was being the organizer and administrator of a terrorist group which “had set itself the goal of triggering civil war-like conditions in Germany and ultimately bringing about the overthrow of the federal government and parliamentary democracy.”
In order to instigate “civil-war-like conditions,” the group’s plans called for attacking power stations, power transmitters, and power supply systems for the purpose of plunging large swaths of Germany into repeated black-outs. There was more: The group also planned to kidnap – and possibly kill — Germany’s Minister of Health, Prof. Dr. Karl Lauterbach.
The terrorist group also had a “military branch,” operating under the name “United Patriots,” which consisted of four men from four different states — Rhineland Palatinate, Brandenburg, Lower Saxony, and Bavaria. The four men were arrested after a raid in April. But it took six months to uncover the role of Elizabeth R. because the four men kept quit during intense interrogations.
The four men arrested in April were known to the police as members of the Reichsbürgerbewegung (Reich Citizens’ Movement), a violent nationalist movement on the fringes of the German far-right scene. The movement does not accept the legitimacy of the post-Second World War German state. They call for restoring Germany’s borders to what they were between 1871 and 1918, and for replacing Germany’s parliamentary democracy with a monarchy, led by a Kaiser.
The movement has about 13,000 followers, with a “soft” periphery of about 5,000-8,000 more.
In the last six years, the group increased its violent actions, focusing on two issues: opposition to Angela Merkel’s policy of accepting more than a million Muslim immigrants in 2015-2016, and the more recent government’s COVID lockdown measures.
