More than a century after Germany‘s last monarchy collapsed, police have arrested Peter Fitzek, a self-styled monarch, and outlawed his “Kingdom of Germany” organisation.
The arrest followed dawn raids in seven federal states on Tuesday on suspicion of criminal activity and claims the group was building up a “counter state” to Germany’s existing constitutional order.
“We’re not talking about a group of harmless nostalgics, but about criminal structures and a criminal network,” Alexander Dobrindt, Germany’s federal interior minister, said. “They underpin their supposed claim to power with anti-Semitic conspiracy narratives.”
Chancellor Friedrich Merz welcomed the move on X, writing: “We are stepping up security in our country. That includes taking action against those who try to fight internally against our constitution.”
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Prosecutors said three people, along with Fitzek, were arrested as suspected ringleaders of a group with “pseudo-state-like structures and institutions”, including its own currency and financial institutions.
The 59-year-old former karate teacher, chef and esoteric book shop owner was born in the eastern city of Halle and has two previous criminal convictions for traffic and financial offences.
Fitzek’s arrest on Tuesday is related to an eight-month prison sentence for assault imposed last September.
He was filmed as he was led away by police in handcuffs, telling the camera: “This is illegal and unlawful.”
The Kingdom of Germany was founded in 2012 and has a reported 6,000 members who say modern Germany is an illegitimate construct. They insist Germany remains a monarchy, as it was before 1918, carry special “kingdom” identity cards and profess loyalty to self-appointed “King” Peter Fitzek.
In 2012 he established the “kingdom”, with him as “supreme sovereign”, in a former hospital in the eastern city of Wittenberg, famed for the Reformation.
Since then the “kingdom” has expended, often using seminars on esoteric topics to attract new members into the organisation. Investigators view it as a Ponzi scheme, where new “subjects” transferred their own savings into Fitzek-run “common-good” banks and health insurance schemes.
These funds, along with voluntary kingdom tax income, were then used to purchase properties and land for so-called “common good villages”.
The net began closing on the kingdom in 2023 when Germany’s financial regulator closed down Fitzek-controlled savings banks, accusing them of operating illegal financial institutions.
Now Germany’s intelligence service and police have moved in, seeing links to the wider “Reichsbürger”, meaning Citizens of the Reich, a loose network of self-managing militia who reject – and seek to undermine – the modern democratic German state.
German authorities estimate that about 25,000 people profess a Reichsbürger affiliation, with about 1,350 ready to defend their beliefs with violent means.
Several members of a supposed Reichsbürger cell were arrested in December 2022 and are now on trial on suspicion of attempting to overthrow the German state.
