00:00One of the biggest cases that Germany has seen in decades, the trial of members of a group accused of plotting to storm the Bundestag and topple the government.
00:07The defendants include a prince, a former MP and several ex-army officers.
00:12Their plan was uncovered by the authorities back in 2022.
00:16The accused are said to have taken inspiration from various conspiracy theories, amongst them the QAnon movement.
00:21They are said to have believed that Germany was being run by a deep state.
00:26Let's get more on that from France 24's Nick Holdsworth who joins us from Berlin.
00:29Nick, this is a really complex trial. It's been held in three phases in three cities.
00:34Today's phase in Frankfurt. Tell us what happened.
00:38Nothing much happened today. Much of the time was taken up with procedural arguments.
00:42All that really happened was that the nine defendants in this particular part of these three trials were asked their names, ages and marital status.
00:51The ringleader, the alleged ringleader who stars himself on Prince Heinrich XIII of Rus, just quietly gave his age and confirmed that he'd been born in Thuringia.
01:04What is interesting here is that you have really something of a sort of a Hollywood movie cast of characters.
01:11You've got the self-styled prince who's actually an estate agent.
01:15You've had meetings in his hunting lodge and in motorway service stations.
01:20They were allegedly plotting to conduct an armed raid on the Bundestag, German parliament,
01:28take MPs hostage and parade the Chancellor, Olaf Scholz, in chains on German TV
01:34in the hope that the German people would rise in support of their idea of re-establishing the old borders of the German Reich of 1918, which seems to be a central idea.
01:45These two trials, there are dozens of people involved. I think the number's around 29.
01:51One has been taking place in Stuttgart already for a couple of months, where they're trying the alleged military wing of this group called Patriotic Union.
02:02The Frankfurt trial is focusing on the alleged ringleaders in a purpose-built iron courthouse of bulletproof glass between observers and the court.
02:14A third trial in Munich is due to start next month, focusing on the so-called esoteric wing of the organisation.
02:21Apparently, some of these characters plotted their moves according to the movements of the stars and other devices.
02:29It's a bizarre trial, but it does reflect a serious concern in Germany today of increasing extremism on the fringes of the political spectrum
02:42of people willing to use violence. Indeed, just this month, the former mayor of Berlin was attacked in the library
02:48and a German member of the European Parliament was hospitalised after being jumped on while putting up campaign posters.
02:54So there is quite a concern. And just last week, a court upheld the right of the German domestic intelligence service to continue keeping AFD,
03:04which is a far-right political group which enjoys about 20% support in Germany.
03:08They agreed to allow that domestic intelligence service to keep them under continuing surveillance, wiretapping, infiltration, etc.
03:16Yeah, I mean, it really looks, doesn't it, like with this case, like the German authorities managed to avert something that could have been, I mean, pretty disastrous for the country.
03:25Indeed, even if this alleged plot to carry out a coup hadn't been successful, even if they had tried to attack the Bundestag and been defeated,
03:40people would have died. There would have been a lot of bloodshed. It would have sent shockwaves through the German system.
03:46And indeed, the fact that allegedly one of the characters involved in this alleged plot, the girlfriend, a Russian girlfriend of Heinrich XIII, Prince of Rus',
03:58she apparently got in touch with some German consular officials in Leipzig and also in Bratislava in Slovakia, trying to bring the Russians on board to support this.
04:10We don't know much more about that side of it, but certainly we do know that some of the extremist and far-right groups in Germany do maintain links with the Russians.
04:19And of course, it's always in Vladimir Putin's interest to undermine and subvert Western democracies.
04:25Okay, so a Russian dimension to that story as well. Well, thank you very much indeed, Nick Holdsworth in Berlin. Thank you for bringing us all the latest on that.
