A former chef declared himself King of Germany. This week Germany arrested him

As dawn broke over Germany's eastern state of Saxony on Tuesday morning, heavily armed police massed outside a property in the picturesque village of Halsbrücke and prepared to smash down its front door.
It was 6am, and inside the house was a declared enemy of the state. But this was no ordinary criminal, but a monarch, a self-described one at least.
Peter Fitzek, a 59-year-old former chef and karate instructor, has spent more than a decade denying the legitimacy of the Federal Republic of Germany and advocating for a return to the borders established during the Second Reich of 1871-1918.
Following his arrest, it now seems likely that 'Peter I's' political aspirations as 'King of Germany' will meet a similarly ignominious end to those of his hero, the Kaiser.
'This is illegal and unlawful,' he told reporters on Tuesday as he was ushered into a police car. According to the rules of his own self-proclaimed seat, the so-called Kingdom of Germany, he may have been right.
A kingdom 'two and a half times the size of the Vatican'
The son of a digger driver, Fitzek was brought up in East Germany. Having failed to secure elected office, either as a mayor or member of the German Parliament, he felt he had no choice but to proclaim an independent kingdom from the grounds of a former hospital in the city of Wittenberg.
Fitzek filmed his own coronation in 2012, adorned in ermine robes and holding a mediaeval sword. No stranger to publicity, he has continued to be the subject of bemused profiles in media outlets from New York to Tel Aviv to Sydney in the years since.
Life under a king, he told one interviewer, was 'the natural state of the German people'. The country's borders should, he argued, expand to reclaim countries like Poland 'if the people there wanted it'. His own constitution 'came through God – I just dictated it'. And he, himself, was, of course, the reincarnation of the Archangel Uriel.
For all the attention he generated, Fitzek and the disparate grouping of nostalgic, anti-state conspiracy theorists who made up his following were largely dismissed as harmless eccentrics prior to the Covid pandemic.
But after purchasing a 300-acre estate in Saxony in 2022, he boasted that his kingdom was 'now two and a half times the size of the Vatican'.
Embezzlement, tax avoidance and anti-Semitism
As his influence grew, there were plenty of signs that the divine right of Peter I to rule small pockets of eastern Germany risked coming into conflict with the secular rights of the federal German authorities.
In 2017, Fitzek was convicted of embezzlement of £1.2 million, although a higher court overturned the verdict the following year. He has subsequently been convicted for driving without a licence (the court didn't recognise the one issued by his own kingdom), running his own health insurance programme and assault, a district court taking a dim view of his attempt to claim immunity as a head of state.
By 2022, he had claimed 5,000 'citizens', many of them refusing to send their children to school, which is illegal in Germany, or pay tax, which is illegal almost everywhere. Instead, some of his subjects joined his 'system drop-out' seminars, priced at £295 and payable in 'Engelgeld' (angel money), his own currency.
Despite Fitzek's protestations that his kingdom simply stands for a 'willingness to take responsibility', it was designated an extremist organisation in 2022 by the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (BfV), Germany's domestic intelligence agency. Three years of close observation culminated in this week's raids involving 800 security personnel in seven states.
After being arrested along with several other senior 'subjects', Fitzek was accused by Alexander Dobrindt, German's interior minister, of 'undermining the rule of law' and spreading 'antisemitic conspiracy narratives to back up their supposed claim to authority'. His organisation, the Kingdom of Germany, has been banned.
'Today, a significant blow was struck against the so-called Reich Citizens and Self-Governors,' Dobrindt wrote on X. 'With the so-called 'Kingdom of Germany,' the largest association of this scene, which has been growing for years, was banned.'
Dobrindt's tweet is a reminder of the strange, overlapping world of extremist German nostalgics. Abutting the Venn diagram of Fitzek's 'subjects' is the much larger circle of some 25,000 Reichsbürger ('Reich Citizens') who also deny the legitimacy of the country's 1949 constitution and want to re-establish a monarchy that was deposed in 1918.
They have been under observation by the BfV since 2016, when one of its members shot dead a police officer during a raid at his home. The Covid lockdown in 2020 swelled their ranks – and their extremism.
An attempted coup
'People spent a lot of time in isolation, in front of computers,' explains Jakob Guhl, an expert in far-Right extremism at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue. ' Chat forums, such as Telegram, which are [largely] unregulated, saw a huge inflow of anti-vaccine people and far-Right groups. Part of that mix was Reichsbürger, and there was suddenly a far larger audience.'
According to German government figures, Reichsbürger committed 1,000 extremist criminal acts in 2021, a twofold increase from the previous year. Officials estimate that 10 per cent of its members are potentially violent and five per cent Right-wing extremists.
'The ideology of rejecting state authority and holding historical revisionist ideas, many of them anti-Semitic, always had the potential to unload itself very badly,' says Guhl.
As Covid ebbed and flowed, this first manifested itself in protestors attempting to storm the parliament building in Berlin in August 2020, while waving the pre-1918 flag of the German Empire. The following April, the police foiled a plot by a group calling themselves United Patriots, a subset of the Reichsbürger movement, who wanted to kidnap the health minister, foster a civil war and overthrow the democratic system. Four men aged 46 to 58 and a 77-year-old former teacher were jailed in March this year.
The most infamous manifestation of the Reichsbürgers' violent, revisionist intentions was an attempted coup in December 2022, foiled by 5,000 police officers operating in 11 of Germany's 16 states, the largest such operation since 1945. The plot contained many farcical elements, notably a belief that Elizabeth II was part of a global, child-abusing elite and a cast of conspirators that included minor aristocrats, a chef and an opera singer. However, its deadly intentions were apparent from the discovery of 380 guns, 350 bladed weapons and more than 148,000 rounds of ammunition. Its alleged members, whose trials started last year and are still ongoing, included a former AfD member of the Bundestag and a founding member of the German special forces.
Interviewed by the BBC shortly after the attempted coup, Fitzek said he had no intention of doing something similar himself (although he did describe the German state as 'destructive and sick', adding he had 'no interest in being part of this fascist and satanic system'). It is, however, interesting to note that some of the conspirators espoused the same historical views as the 'Kingdom of Germany', notably the self-proclaimed Heinrich XIII, a 73-year-old prince from the House of Reuss, who was alleged to have been central to their plans.
Under-35s most likely to want return of the monarchy
Prince Reuss, whose family ruled parts of Thuringia until 1918, has recorded videos complaining that his '1,000-year dynasty' had been unjustly usurped. His co-conspirators allegedly shared a vision of returning Germany to elements of its Bismarckian constitutional settlement – a sentiment which enjoys a low but substantial level of support across Germany.
Recent polls have shown that almost 10 per cent of the population would like to see the return of the monarchy, a figure that doubles for those under the age of 34.
'The Second Reich is a bit less problematic than harking back to the Nazis,' explains Guhl. 'It doesn't have the same level of toxicity attached to it. The symbols don't tend to be banned; the flags won't necessarily get you into trouble. It's a past that's easier to idealise for movements that want an idealised version of the past.'
But this idealised version of the Second Reich ignores the reality of a new country riven by political and cultural divisions and destroyed in the First World War by the Kaiser's ham-fisted Weltpolitik.
And as Dobrindt, the interior minister said of Fitzek's arrest this week: 'We are not talking about a group of harmless nostalgics, as the title of the organisation might suggest, but about criminal structures and a criminal network.'
There is also an argument that these German nostalgics, however ill-intentioned, would benefit from a better grasp of the historical period they claim to fetishise. The Kaiser died unhappily in exile in 1941, rejected by his own people. Even at the start of the second Reich, a mere Prussian aristocrat knew how to put minor royalty in its place. When Bismarck, the German chancellor, was unifying Germany in 1870, he placated the reluctant King Ludwig of II of Bavaria by offering him his own separate postal service – and little else.

Try Our AI Features

Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:

Learn with AIFact CheckingText to SpeechAI Summary

Related Articles

Reuters

an hour ago

• Reuters

Germany against suspending EU deal with Israel, official says

BERLIN, June 23 (Reuters) - Germany does not support calls to suspend a pact governing Israel's relations with the European Union, a government official said on Monday, highlighting divisions within the bloc. There has been deepening concern in European capitals in recent months about Israel's military operations in Gaza and the humanitarian situation in the enclave. Spain's foreign minister said earlier on Monday he would ask the EU council to approve an immediate suspension of the EU-Israel Association agreement in protest over what he called human rights violations in Gaza. The bloc's diplomatic service also said on Friday that Israel may have breached its human rights obligations in Gaza and the West Bank under the deal. Israel rejected that report as a "moral and methodological failure". "Our position is very clear - we do not support either a suspension or a partial suspension," the official said at a German government briefing. As such an upcoming EU summit will involve intense discussions about Iran and Israel but is unlikely to result in any decisions, the official said. Germany has long followed a policy of special responsibility for Israel, known as the Staatsraeson, due to the legacy of the Nazi Holocaust, and been much slower during the current conflict to criticize Israel for its conduct than other EU states.

BBC News

3 hours ago

• BBC News

World Business Report Will Iran close the Strait of Hormuz?

A narrow area of sea at the mouth of the Gulf has become the focus of global concern after the United States bombing of Iran. While Iran's parliament has voted to close the Strait of Hormuz, there is no sign of disruption of the sea passage that carries a fifth of the world's oil. So is Iran likely to take action there, and what would the effect be? Roger Hearing discusses whether Germany and Italy will repatriate their national gold reserves of $245billion from the New York Federal Reserve over fears about President Donald Trump's erratic policymaking amid wider geopolitical unrest. And we hear how the pursuit of shopping convenience is leading to exhausted workers and struggling family-run businesses in India. The latest business and finance news from around the world, on the BBC.

Reuters

4 hours ago

• Reuters

ECB's Lagarde urges EU lawmakers to speed up digital euro law

FRANKFURT, June 23 (Reuters) - European Central Bank President Christine Lagarde on Monday urged European lawmakers to speed up the introduction of legislation backing the launch of a digital euro. The ECB has been working for years on a digital version of the single currency, essentially an online wallet, but it needs the European Parliament to pass legislation -- a step that has proven elusive amid resistance from lawmakers. Lagarde renewed her plea in the European Parliament on Monday, describing the digital euro as key to Europe's financial autonomy and taking aim at competing, privately issued digital currencies known as stablecoins. "A legislative framework to pave the way for the potential introduction of a digital euro should be put in place rapidly, please," Lagarde told a committee of the European Parliament. The European Commission proposed digital euro legislation in June 2023, but not much has happened since. If the European Parliament passes the necessary law, the ECB's Governing Council hopes to vote on launching a digital euro in the autumn. Representatives from four of the eight political groupings that make up the European Parliament have said an outage in the ECB's existing payment system earlier this year raised some questions about the central bank's ability to deliver a digital euro project. In the ECB's design, digital euros would be available to all euro area residents, probably up to a threshold in the 3,000 euro ($3,440.40) region. They would be guaranteed by the central bank but made available by banks and wallet operators. European bankers have mostly been sceptical, fearing that it would empty their coffers as customers transfer some of their cash to the safety of an ECB-guaranteed wallet. A study by accounting firm PwC on behalf of some bank industry bodies estimated the digital euro may cost the banking sector between 18 billion euros and 30 billion euros in technical, commercial and operational expenses. The ECB has pitched the digital euro as a response to U.S. President Donald Trump's push to promote stablecoins, a type of cryptocurrency typically pegged to the U.S. dollar. Lagarde said stablecoins posed "risks for monetary policy and financial stability" because they could lure deposits away from banks and don't always maintain their fixed value. Stablecoin TerraUSD collapsed in May 2022 when it was unable to maintain its peg to the dollar. Its collapse and that of its sister token Luna caused a market crash that triggered a wave of bankruptcies in the crypto industry. Lagarde also noted there was no global regulation for this corner of the market and the issuer of the largest stablecoin, Tether, was based in El Salvador, "which lacks any prudential framework" for this product. "This fragmented approach prevents a global level playing field and can open the door to new risks and systemic vulnerabilities," Lagarde said. "We must therefore remain alert to developments in other jurisdictions and advocate for globally aligned regulations for stablecoins." ($1 = 0.8720 euros)