Five people have been sentenced to prison over what the authorities in Germany described as a plot to kidnap the country’s health minister on live television in 2022 in an attempt to destabilize the German state.
After a nearly two-year trial, a court found on Thursday that the five, under a group billed as the “United Patriots,” had planned to create a widespread weekslong power outage and then use the chaos to reinstate a 19th-century Constitution ceding power to an all-powerful Kaiser.
They were convicted of founding or joining a terrorist group, of treason and in some cases of owning illegal guns, rifles and explosives.
Jörn Müller, a spokesman for the court, in Koblenz in western Germany, said the trial had “shown that a democratic constitutional state is capable of dealing with its alleged opponents on the basis of law and order in a fair and independent trial.”
The court sentenced a 46-year-old man whom it had determined to be the group’s central figure to eight years in prison. A 77-year-old woman who holds a Ph.D in theology and frequently interrupted the court hearings with antisemitic and conspiracy-theory-laced diatribes was handed a sentence of seven years and nine months. Three other men, all in their 50s, received sentences ranging from six and a half years to two years and 10 months.
In accordance with German privacy laws, the court identified the defendants only by their initials.
The five were part of the Reichsbürger scene, a loosely affiliated antisemitic far-right grouping that does not accept the legitimacy of the modern German state. Their planned overthrow was not directly related to a far more complex, and far more dangerous, plot surrounding a disgruntled prince that is currently being tried in three separate courts in Germany.
After meeting and radicalizing on a Telegram chat group during the pandemic, members of the plot tried to buy and hoard weapons and other tools for their plans, according to the case brought by the prosecutors. Police searches after their arrest in 2022 yielded 52 packets of low-grade explosives, with which the authorities said the group hoped to use to disable large parts of the power grid.
Members of the group were arrested while trying to buy AK-47 assault rifles, mines and bulletproof vests. The seller was an undercover police officer and the exchange was a setup.
The five convicted on Thursday had focused their ire on Germany’s health minister, Karl Lauterbach, a medical doctor and former professor who has taught at the Harvard School of Public Health. During the pandemic, he was an outspoken proponent of vaccination rules, often appearing on television panel shows to explain the medical science behind the spread of the coronavirus.
On Thursday, he thanked the German police for keeping him safe. “The state has shown that it can defend itself against violent conspiracy theorists,” he said on social media.
